Sitting outside his house in a village in Pawapuri area of ​Bihar’s ​Nalanda district, a 68-year-old man was made a strange offer by an acquaintance on a February evening. 

“If you want help for any child who aims to clear NEET-UG, tell me. I’ll get it done,” said the acquaintance, offering an undergraduate seat – in India’s premier medical institutes through the entrance exam conducted by the National Testing Agency – with a guarantee on a 1,000-rupee stamp paper. All he wanted was Rs 8 lakh up front, and Rs 30 lakh later. But the old man refused, saying there was no candidate in his family eligible to take the NEET exam.

It wasn’t limited to that village in Nalanda. Next month, an accused in several paper-leak cases told some news channels that the NEET-UG paper would be leaked, and that the institutions concerned should be on their guard. And then the paper leaked. 

The Supreme Court has now asked the National Testing Agency to verify the nature and scale of the leak before it decides on the possibility of a wider retest. While the Union education ministry had earlier upheld the integrity of the exam, the CBI has been making arrests and questioning suspects in states such as Gujarat, Bihar, and Jharkhand.

But such was the state of preparedness of the paper-leak mafia that as early as February, they were recruiting clients in Bihar for the NEET exam to be held in May.

Bihar police sources, as well as documents related to the economic offences unit investigation seen by Newslaundry, now suggest the racket in the state was led by alleged kingpin and government employee Sanjeev Mukhiya, with his home district Nalanda as its epicentre.

It’s suspected to be a multilayered operation, with different members responsible for different functions: from leaking the papers and circulating them, to reaching out to the candidates, routing the money, and arranging logistics such as venues and vehicles. 

The number of arrests has risen to at least 25 in Bihar, including 18 after the case was handed over to the EOU and the rest by CBI.

It was a car chase in Patna on the day of the NEET-UG exam that tied Mukhiya, who has been named in other paper leaks before, to the fresh tempest. And a school in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh to the alleged racket.

The Jharkhand chase after intelligence tip-off

In the middle of the NEET exam on May 5, Patna Police were told by the Intelligence Bureau about a gang that had leaked the paper, according to sources. They were also given information about a white Renault Duster, with a Jharkhand number plate, being used for the purpose. Patna Police immediately swung into action.

Amar Kumar, the SHO of Shastri Nagar police station, who was patrolling towards the Rajvanshi Nagar turn on Bailey Road, saw the vehicle coming. According to an FIR lodged by him that day, there were three people in the car, who started running away when they saw police. The three – Sikandar Yadavendu, Akhilesh Kumar and Bittu Kumar, the driver – were caught with the help of other policemen. 

Photocopies of the admit cards of four NEET candidates were allegedly found in the car. Police started investigating these four. Some of their family members were also arrested. Soon, the secrets of the paper-leak gang started unravelling. 

The first link in the chain

Sikandar Yadavendu, the first link in the chain, comes from Samastipur. He worked as a contractor in Ranchi before becoming a government employee in Bihar. Currently, he is a junior engineer in the Danapur Municipal Council. There is a case of corruption against him, but he doesn’t have any criminal record related to paper leaks.

In 2012, Yadavendu cleared an exam conducted by the Bihar Staff Selection Commission and was appointed a junior engineer. The same year, his daughter got admission into MBBS. She completed the course in 2016, but runs a sports goods shop.

Yadavendu had allegedly gathered the four candidates. 

One of them was his nephew Anurag Yadav, aged 21 years. A native of Samastipur, Anurag had taken the NEET exam in 2022 and 2023 without success.

Another of Yadavendu’s candidates was Abhishek Kumar, 21, from Ranchi. He, too, had appeared for NEET in 2022 and 2023 without success. Abhishek’s father, Awadhesh Kumar, is an old acquaintance of Yadavendu from his days as a contractor in Ranchi. While Abhishek and Awadhesh live in Ranchi, the former chose Patna as the centre for his exam. Investigators see this as an indication of the planning for the paper leak.

Awadhesh has allegedly told the investigators that Yadavendu had made an offer in 2023 to him to arrange for Abhishek to pass the NEET exam. While Yadavendu allegedly took nearly Rs 40 lakh from others, he settled for only Rs 30 lakh in Abhishek’s case. Awadhesh gave two blank SBI cheques to Yadavendu, who promised to get the work done this year if not in 2023. On May 3, this year, Awadhesh arrived in Patna with Abhishek and handed him over to Yadavendu.

Yadavendu’s third client was Ayush Kumar, a 19-year-old resident of Danapur. Ayush, too, had unsuccessfully taken the NEET exam in 2023. Ayush's father, Akhilesh Kumar, who runs a brick kiln called Gokul Bricks, told the EOU that he had gone to the Danapur Municipal Council to get a map approved, where he met Yadavendu. During the conversation, when Akhilesh mentioned that his son was applying for the NEET exam, Yadavendu allegedly offered to help. A deal was allegedly made for Rs 40 lakh, and Akhilesh gave a blank cheque of IDBI Bank to Yadavendu.

The fourth client was 18-year-old Shivanandan Kumar from Gaya. His father, Ramswaroop Yadav, was known to Yadavendu.

The ‘middleman’ and the gang

The next link in the chain is Amit Anand, a 29-year-old native of Munger. After earning a BTech degree, he took a course in leadership and management at the Indian Institute of Democratic Leadership, Mumbai. At the time of the paper leak, Anand was running a “job consultancy”.

He, too, came in contact with Yadavendu during a visit to the latter’s office to get a map passed in 2022. Anand is allegedly associated with the Sanjeev Mukhiya gang (more on that later), but has no history of crime.

On the evening of May 4, Yadavendu had allegedly handed over the four candidates he had gathered to Anand, who became the key resource after this. Anand allegedly used to take students preparing for competitive exams to Nitish Kumar, the third link in the chain.

Ashutosh Kumar, an acquaintance of Anand who is also arrested in this case, claimed that the latter was looking for a NEET candidate. So Ashutosh – along with his roommate, Roshan Kumar, and landlord, Sonu Kumar – allegedly found a candidate named Anshuman Yadav, a native of UP’s Ballia. Five days before the exam, Roshan allegedly sent Anshuman’s registration slip to Anand’s phone.

The half-burnt papers and Hazaribagh link

The total number of candidates who cleared NEET in Patna with the alleged help of this racket was 15 – a total of nearly 100 are under suspicion. Out of these 15, four were brought in by Yadavendu, six by Nitish and four by Anand. One came through Roshan and Ashutosh.

Nitish Kumar went to jail in March 2024 in the paper-leak case involving the recruitment of teachers by the Bihar Public Service Commission, or BPSC. He is currently out on bail. In the same case, Sanjeev Mukhiya’s son, Shiv, who studied medicine at Patna Medical College and Hospital, is also in jail.

All the NEET candidates gathered by the paper-leak gang were allegedly taken to Patna’s Learn Boys School in Ramakrishna Nagar in Khemnichak area on the night of May 4. Finding this school in the city’s Khemnichak area is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack.

This school has never seen a student. Three tenants lived in the building – two on the upper floor and one below. The tenants on the lower floor had vacated the place on May 1. The NEET candidates were allegedly kept here.

An official associated with the paper-leak investigation claimed that the purpose of keeping the candidates at this school was to ensure that no one got a clue about the activities of the gang. People living nearby told us that they came to know about the goings-on in the building only when police arrived.

A woman living in the neighbourhood said, “No child ever came to study in this school. Tenants used to live here. Sometimes the owner also came. We have no information about what happened here on May 4-5. It was only when police reached here on May 5 that we came to know about the paper leak.”

Anand’s acquaintance Ashutosh Kumar used to live as a tenant on the second floor of the building. His ailing parents also stayed here for a few days. The gang had allegedly booked the school through Ashutosh for a hefty sum.

Nitish told police he was introduced to Ashutosh by Manish Prakash – both of them arrested by the CBI after it took over the case.

On the night of May 4, the candidates were allegedly taken to the school in different vehicles. Chintu Kumar alias Baldev Kumar, Pintu Kumar and Nitish Kumar were allegedly present. The answers for the NEET paper came on Chintu’s phone at 9 am on May 5, and were given to the candidates to memorise.

The printouts of the questions and answers given to the candidates were taken back before they were quickly driven to their respective exam centres, and the responsibility of destroying the prints was given to Chintu, Pintu and Ashutosh, suggests the probe. They allegedly set the papers on fire but made a mistake which was to later become a noose around their necks. 

Based on the information received from Yadavendu and others, when police reached Learn Boys School on May 5, they found these papers, half-burnt. The booklet number of the paper – 6136488 – was visible. More than 73 questions could be read. 

It was through this booklet number that the EOU came to know about the Hazaribagh connection of the paper leak. Booklet number 6136488 had been allotted to a girl student in Hazaribagh’s Oasis School. 

The CBI has arrested the principal and the vice-principal of the Oasis School. It has also arrested Jamaluddin, who looked after advertisement work in the Prabhat Khabar newspaper’s local office and was allegedly in touch with the principal. The investigating agency has also questioned Salauddin, the Hazaribagh bureau chief of Prabhat Khabar (who has since been removed). Salauddin and Jamaluddin are brothers.

All roads lead to Nalanda, and a ‘quota’

A senior EOU officer said: “Whenever a paper leaks in Bihar, the investigating team becomes active in Nalanda, the hotbed of paper leaks.” 

The officer claimed there now exists a “Sanjeev Mukhiya quota” in Bihar, just like how the “Ranjit Don quota existed”. 

Ranjit Don is a moniker for Dr Kumar Suman Singh, an accused in several paper leaks two decades ago who also tried to contest elections and runs a pharma business from Delhi. Sanjeev Mukhiya is seen as “Ranjit Don’s” disciple, and Nalanda is his home. Mukhiya’s name has come up in many paper leaks. An FIR has been registered against him in the NEET case as well on the basis of Yadavendu’s statement, but he is still out of the investigating team’s reach.

Sanjeev Mukhiya has been working as a technical assistant at Nalanda Udyan Mahavidyalaya since 2012 and gets a salary of Rs 65,000 per month.

Pranay Kumar Pankaj, the senior clerk at the college, said, “We didn’t know that he was involved in such activities. He used to come in a car and minded his own business. Now it’s coming to light that he has a lot of money, but he has never fed anyone sweets worth even one rupee.”

Another employee of the college said on the condition of anonymity that everyone knows about Sanjeev Mukhiya. “Just two months ago, his son went to jail in a paper-leak case. He used to sit at Buddha restaurant here. Its owner has also gone to jail.” 

“While working here, Sanjeev went to jail in 2016 in a paper-leak case...people are connected to one another here, so no one speaks. On top of that, Sanjeev is very powerful. He has been visiting Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. There are pictures of his wife with the CM. In such a situation, people avoid speaking out of fear.”

Pankaj said that on May 14, the college administration wrote a letter to Sanjeev for being absent from duty without intimation. He replied on May 21, saying he was sick, and attached a medical certificate from PMCH. He asked for a month’s leave, which ended on June 6, but he has not returned to his job yet.

Newslaundry has a copy of the medical certificate prepared by Dr (Prof) RD Singh of the medicine department of PMCH, according to which, Sanjeev visited the hospital for a checkup on May 6 and again on May 21.

We asked PMCH officials whether Sanjeev was admitted to the hospital, but they refused to answer. The deputy superintendent said, “If the CBI asks for information, we will provide it.”

Sanjeev’s house is in Balwa, Nalanda, where Newslaundry met his younger brother and mother. The brother left the place after finding out that we were from the media. His mother, a former government nurse, described her son as innocent before asking us to leave. “You mediapersons are showing me all kinds of stories…Look at our house. Do you think this is the house of a person who owns crores of rupees?”

Buses, banquet halls: The Hazaribagh link to another leak

Sanjeev’s influence and the political patronage enjoyed by him can be gauged from the fact that despite being accused in the teacher-recruitment paper leak in March and chased by police, he kept coming to the college and doing his work.

The college’s senior clerk said: “In the month of April, an EOU team came looking for him but he was not present at the college. He was on leave. After that, he came to the college, did his work and also took his salary for the month of April.”

The teacher-recruitment exam was to be held in Bihar on March 15, and about 250 students were allegedly sent to Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh in buses, kept in banquet halls and hotels in the district, and made to learn the answers by rote. Hazaribagh police had caught the bus after the exam. The paper was cancelled. Sanjeev’s son, Shiv, is currently in jail in this case. 

Amitabh Das, a staunch critic of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who was forced by the state government to prematurely retire from the IPS “in public interest” in 2018, said: “Officers deployed for the security of the chief minister called me in the last week of June and told me that Sanjeev Mukhiya, who is being pursued by Bihar Police, is sitting at the chief minister’s residence. I made a video on this and uploaded it on my YouTube channel. If I was wrong, summons would have arrived by now.”

Newslaundry contacted the office of the chief minister to seek comments on the allegations. This report will be updated if a response is received.

Hazaribagh Police had also detained Prabhat Khabar photographer Dilip Verma and questioned him for hours in the teacher recruitment scam case. 

Verma, who has been associated with the newspaper for about 15 years, is close to Salauddin, who was then the chief of the paper’s Hazaribagh bureau and whose brother Jamaluddin is now arrested in the NEET-UG exam case.

Salauddin was also questioned for hours by the CBI, after which he was removed from the bureau chief’s post by Prabhat Khabar. He is not meeting anyone at present. We went to his residence on Azad Road, Hazaribagh, to meet him and called him several times, but the gate remained shut. His nephew told us that Salauddin was not in Hazaribagh and had gone to Ranchi.

However, Verma told us he was not interrogated in the paper-leak case. “I had entered inside clicking pictures, so I was questioned about that,” he said.

During the investigation of the NEET paper leak, when the EOU found that booklet number 6136488 was issued at Oasis School in Hazaribagh, the school’s principal and NTA’s district coordinator, Dr Ahsanul Haque, held a press conference and gave interviews to many media outlets. 

The media outreach is said to have been organised by Jamaluddin, who used to look after Prabhat Khabar’s advertisement work in Hazaribagh and had a rapport with the owners of many colleges and coaching institutes of the city. 

The reason behind Jamaluddin’s arrest is the constant conversations he had with Haque, the principal, on the day of the incident and thereafter.

Unanswered questions

Questions still remain about how the paper leaked in Hazaribagh. 

The paper was sent from Ranchi on May 3 via Bluedart courier service. It is being said that the paper was delivered to the main branch of SBI in Hazaribagh in an e-rickshaw by its driver, Manoj Kumar.

The paper was first taken allegedly to Oasis School. To check the veracity of this claim, we went to meet Manoj Kumar, who had already been questioned by the CBI. We could not find him. His elder brother, Babban Kumar, said: “He was asked to deliver the box (paper) and he did so. If it was such an important item, they should have sent it in a government vehicle. Why was it sent by an e-rickshaw?”

The NTA had sent the paper to two banks in Hazaribagh – a protocol to guard against leaks. Apart from SBI, it was also sent to Canara Bank – again in an e-rickshaw. 

Anand Prabhat, the manager of Canara Bank, claimed that earlier also the paper used to come by e-rickshaw or autorickshaw. “Not only this time, but every time two sets of papers come. I don’t know whether the questions in both are the same or different. For the last two years, only SBI’s paper has been used. Before that, it used to be Canara Bank’s.”

“On May 4, I got a call from the district coordinator, Dr Ahsanul Haque, who said ‘you should be ready tomorrow, we will come to collect the paper by seven o’clock’. I had sent my colleagues to the bank early in the morning. However, they called and told me that the paper had been collected from SBI. I don’t know when the coordinator is informed about this by the NTA.”

When the EOU team reached Hazaribagh, it found that the sealed cover of the paper was cut from the bottom before booklet number 6136488 was taken out. Then it was glued again. During the CBI investigation, the sleuths searched for the glue for about three hours but could not find it.

Before being taken into custody by the CBI, Haque said: “When we saw the cover of that paper after the EOU officials told us, we also came to know that something was wrong. Now where the mistake was will be known only after investigation.”

The-then manager and deputy manager of SBI Hazaribagh were transferred in June. The new manager, Birendra Kumar, refused to comment, saying there was a ban on talking to the media. “Talk to the NTA or the Patna office,” he said.

Oasis School’s vice-principal, Imtiyaz Alam, was the centre coordinator for the exam. The observer at Oasis School was Dr Vishwa Ranjan, a commerce professor from Annada College, Hazaribagh. When we visited Annada College to talk to him, the principal, Nilmani Mukherjee, said Ranjan had been forbidden by the NTA to talk to the media. “So whatever you want to know, ask me.”

Mukherjee told Newslaundry: “On the day of the exam, the observer goes to the bank and picks up the paper. After the paper is brought from there, it is kept in a locker built in the school, whose key is with the observer. The lock of the box in which the paper arrives opens automatically at a time fixed by the NTA and the paper is taken out in front of the centre coordinator and two candidates. All this is recorded on video. After that the paper is given to the students.”

The automatic lock (digital) did not open on time at many exam centres in Hazaribagh.

Prof Brahmadev Trivedi, who was the observer at the city’s DAV School during the NEET exam, told Newslaundry: "I have been an observer four times. I can say with confidence that it is impossible for the paper to leak after it is put under the supervision of the observer. The paper is locked in a seven-layer box. The digital lock opens automatically at the scheduled time. If it fails to open, we have to break it. Inside, there are six more layers made of different materials, some of which have to be cut with a saw. The observer gets all this done under CCTV surveillance. The NTA is taking information every moment. Many times, if the invigilators are talking to each other during the exam, the observer gets a call from the NTA.”

For the last three times, the NTA has been appointing Haque as the district coordinator. He is also the coordinator of the Class 10 and Class 12 exams conducted by the CBSE.

What are the criteria for the NTA to decide the district coordinator? And if the same person is appointed every year, won’t the paper-leak gang have better chances of reaching the person? What was the reason the digital lock did not work?  

The principal of a prominent school in Hazaribagh told us that Haque’s school is not so prominent. 

It’s not just Hazaribagh where principals of smaller schools have been granted a role in the examination process.

SS Sahay of Dony Polo Public School, for example, has been made the state coordinator in Bihar. He has a senior secondary school in Bihta near Patna and another near Danapur. Neither school has a playground. 

An EOU officer told Newslaundry: “During our investigation, we did not question the state coordinator, but when I came across the name of Dony Polo Public School, I had to google it. There are many famous schools in Patna. I had never heard the name of this school. One thing I didn’t understand was why the principal of a private school was given the responsibility of state coordinator when the principal of a Kendriya Vidyalaya was present.”

PK Singh, the principal of Kendriya Vidyalaya, Bailey Road, and Manisha Sinha, the principal of Radiant International School, were made sub-coordinators.

We called Sahay several times but he didn’t answer. We went to his school in Bihta, where we were told that he was at the Danapur school. When we reached the school in Danapur, we were told that he was in Bihta. The manager of this school, Prateek Kumar, sent us out saying he did not want to talk to the media.

Manisha Sinha, the principal of Radiant International School, also refused to talk about NEET. Her personal assistant said: “Madam is ready to talk about other issues but not NEET.”

The Supreme Court will hear the matter again this week.

If you liked this report, contribute to our Sena project to help us tell more stories on NEET irregularities.