NEET-UG 2026 leak: CBI says paper setting done at NTA's Okhla office

The CBI charge sheet in the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak case leans heavily on data from a residential society's access-control app to link three NTA subject experts to the alleged leak, officials said.

The agency filed its July 28 charge sheet against 13 accused before a special CBI court. Digital forensic evidence includes records from an app used by the Pune society where accused chemistry expert PV Kulkarni lived, according to officials. The app logs entry and exit of visitors. The CBI used it to establish that students and their parents were at the society in April, before the May 3 exam. Call data records and mobile phone location analysis backed that presence, officials said.

The charge sheet places Kulkarni, zoology and botany expert Manisha Gurunath Mandhare, and physics expert Manisha Sanjay Havaldar at the center of the operation. They allegedly exploited procedural gaps inside the NTA's Okhla office – where paper setting, translation, and back translation occurred – to leak exam questions for money, the agency said.

The CBI traced the experts through beautician Manisha Sanjay Waghmare, who allegedly passed leaked papers to aspirants in Rajasthan and Haryana via intermediaries. According to the charge sheet, Waghmare arranged for students to attend coaching classes Kulkarni and Mandhare ran in April. She later collected the students' notebooks, which contained questions the two experts had dictated, with sections marked "important" and "very important."

Havaldar, at Mandhare's direction, provided 16 pages of physics questions – 68 total – to an aspirant's mother, officials said.