22.8 lakh students sat NEET UG 2026 on May 3. By May 12, the entire exam was cancelled after a paper leak. The reason had been circulating on WhatsApp weeks before they walked into the hall.
120 Questions, ₹25 Lakh, and a BAMS Student in Nashik
A 410-question “guess paper” had been on WhatsApp groups for up to a month before the exam. When Rajasthan’s Special Operations Group lined it up against the real paper, 120 questions matched — most from the Chemistry section. The mafia selling it was charging ₹10 lakh to ₹25 lakh per copy across states.
Shubham Khairnar, a 30-year-old BAMS student from Nashik, bought one for ₹10 lakh from a Pune contact and resold it for ₹15 lakh to a buyer in Haryana. Net profit: ₹5 lakh in a few days. He was arrested last week. 45 others were detained in Maharashtra. A Gurugram doctor is linked to a separate ₹30 lakh deal. Sikar, in Rajasthan, is now the focal point of the CBI probe that took over from the SOG on Tuesday.
That is the case. The problem is older.
The Third CBI Probe in Two Years
This is the third time the CBI has been called in to investigate an NTA exam since 2024. The agency conducting NEET has had three Directors General in under two years — one removed in June 2024 after the last NEET scandal, a replacement in October 2025, and Abhishek Singh handed charge just days before this paper went live. UGC NET was cancelled the night before its 2024 sitting. CUET had irregularities. NEET 2025 results were stayed in two High Courts.
This is not a leak. It is a sieve. Like India’s industrial safety law is from 1923, the institutional framework hasn’t meaningfully caught up with the scale of the problem.
The Re-Exam Nobody Trusts
NTA says the new exam will be announced in 7-10 days. No fresh fee, no re-registration. Same agency, same physical OMR supply chain across India — the format a parliamentary panel already asked the government to scrap. FAIMA has moved the Supreme Court — the Supreme Court called a ‘brazen challenge’ to the system in another institutional failure just weeks ago — asking for NTA to be dissolved entirely and the re-test to be conducted under a retired SC judge.
22.8 lakh students will sit the exam again. Roughly 1 lakh MBBS seats are waiting. The first paper was compromised before they wrote a single answer. The second will be conducted by the institution that failed them.
The NEET UG 2026 paper leak exposed an NTA that cannot secure its own exams. The CBI probe is the third in two years. The students are the only ones who lost a year they cannot get back. India’s biggest custodial conviction — and a system that still hasn’t changed — the pattern is familiar: accountability arrives, reform doesn’t.