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A trunk opened in a school control room, MBBS students hired to solve the paper, Rs 25–30 lakh a candidate: the CBI's account of the NEET-UG 2024 leak
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is the single gate to every MBBS seat in India, and in 2024 more than two million candidates sat it. What happened to the paper before 5 May 2024 became the largest examination scandal in the country's recent history, and the charge sheets describe a business.
According to Business Standard and ANI, reporting the Central Bureau of Investigation's charge sheets, the question paper was stolen on 5 May from the control room of Oasis School in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, after the trunks containing it arrived from a bank vault. The CBI alleged that the school's principal, Ahsanul Haque, and vice-principal, Imtiaz Alam, let a man named Pankaj Kumar, a 2017 civil-engineering graduate of the National Institute of Technology in Jamshedpur, into the room, where he opened the trunks with tools. The paper, the agency said, was photographed and passed to a group of MBBS students who solved it, and the solved questions were distributed to candidates gathered at a guest house in Hazaribagh who had paid around Rs 25 to 30 lakh each. The CBI's third charge sheet, filed in Patna in October 2024, ran to more than 5,500 pages, named 21 accused and cited 298 witnesses. ThePrint reported that in 2025 Bihar Police's Economic Offences Unit arrested Sanjeev Kumar Singh, known as Sanjeev Mukhiya, a technical assistant at a government college in Nalanda who carried a Rs 3 lakh bounty and was described as the alleged mastermind. All accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
The case is here for two reasons. The first is the price: families paid the cost of a private-college seat for a stolen paper, and every one of them was buying a crime. The second is who the solvers were: medical students, recruited to answer the paper for money, whose own futures the charge sheets now list.
For a candidate, the rule is absolute. There is no legitimate way to see a NEET paper early, no "setter's contact", no "leaked set". Anyone offering one is either a fraud taking your money or a criminal taking your career, and in 2024 the second kind was caught with the names of the buyers.
Were you affected by this case, or something like it? Report it with your own evidence, or tell your story — first-person accounts are what stop the next family.
This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.