New Delhi: The CBI has flagged a series of profoundly prosaic security lapses in NEET-UG 2026, underlining the absence of frisking and checking in the “confidential section” of the NTA, lack of proper CCTV monitoring of the place and the involvement of the same set of people for different stages of paper finalisation, officials said.
In its 94-page chargesheet filed before a special court here, the CBI red-flagged the lack of compartmentalisation in the National Testing Agency’s (NTA) workflow, allowing a person to get access to the complete final papers for the medical exam National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET).
The workflow involved four crucial stages—item writing, moderation, vetting and translation.
First, at the item writing stage, experts are called in to provide questions and answers, not knowing if their contributions will be in the final paper.
It is followed by moderation, where some experts are called to select the questions for four sets to be prepared for NTA with uniform difficulty, in which they have to finalise 45 questions for each set—a total of 180 questions.
Next comes vetting, wherein the subject experts solve the question sets finalised by moderators. It is then checked if the answers proposed by vetters and moderators match. In case of dispute, the NTA director sits with moderators and vetters and solves the issue.
The finalised question sets are translated into vernacular languages by subject experts, and the translated versions are then reverse-translated into English by subject experts to verify accuracy and ensure no context is lost in translation.
Ideally, the above steps should be done by distinct experts handling each phase to prevent any single individual from grasping the exam’s full scope, officials said.
“However, in the process actually followed for the NEET UG 2026 examination, it is found that many experts have been involved in multiple stages. Further, from the moderation step onwards, the experts concerned have full access to final sets of questions.
“This is particularly so in the translation/back-translation stage, as here a single expert can see all four of the final master sets,” the agency alleged.
In its investigation, the CBI has chronicled the startlingly porous environment in ‘The Confidential Section’ of NTA that operates from an entire wing of the first floor of the NSIC building in Okhla, where question papers for the high-stakes undergraduate medical course admission are prepared.
The NTA maintained “no practice of checking or frisking of experts” as they entered or exited the confidential section, the agency has alleged.
This absence of such a basic security detail allowed Chemistry expert P.V. Kulkarni to transcribe 135 questions onto “small chits of paper” and smuggle them to his hotel room “unnoticed” for three days while he was working there, it alleged.
The three accused lecturers—Kulkarni for Chemistry, Manisha Gurunath Mandhare for Zoology and Botany, and Manisha Sanjay Havaldar for Physics—on the NTA panel allegedly exploited the loopholes in the workflow of the paper finalisation and managed to recreate the final paper with unprecedented accuracy, which they shared with a close group of students for a substantial financial consideration.
These questions were allegedly accessed by a beautician, Manisha Waghmare, who planted some students in these special classes of Kulkarni and Mandhare. By using the notebooks of these students, she also created a question paper, which she sold through a series of middlemen.
One such paper landed in the hands of an aspirant who complained about the paper leak to the NTA, the CBI has alleged in the charge sheet.
The CBI found that Mandhare, who was working as an English-to-Marathi translator for Botany and a back translator for Zoology, after finishing her work for the day and upon returning to the hotel room, would mark the relevant paragraphs in the NCERT textbooks.
“Due to her decades of experience with the same material, she was easily able to correlate the questions with the NCERT textbook material. Accused Manisha Gurunath Mandhare attended the NTA NEET UG 2026 exam translation and back translation related work of Botany and Zoology between March 9 and April 5,” it said.
The agency also found that Havaldar used to note down the questions in brief after returning to her stay in Delhi at the end of the day’s work.
A major oversight of the NTA flagged by the CBI is the lack of a dedicated, live-feed monitoring control room for its confidential wing, which allowed the activities in the confidential wing to proceed without interruption. This was compounded by the fact that CCTV footage of only 20-25 days was recorded and maintained by the NTA.
“Since confidential section-related work of the NEET UG 2026 exam was completed on April 7 and the instant case was registered on May 12, no CCTV footage of the relevant period was available for investigation purposes.
“Further, there was no dedicated CCTV live feed monitoring control room in NTA. As a result, the activities of the experts in the confidential hall went unnoticed,” the CBI alleged.
The leak of NEET UG papers held on May 3 shattered the confidence of 23 lakh aspirants of undergraduate medical seats, turning into a political slugfest that resulted in the resignation of then Education Minister Dhamendra Pradhan. A re-examination was conducted on June 21.
