A half-burnt scrap of a printout from a leaked NEET-UG 2024 question paper, with its unique bar code still intact, helped to unravel the conspiracy and modus operandi of a gang whose leader is yet to be caught.
The story behind the leak of the medical entrance examination paper, which became a political embarrassment for the government, was narrated by the Central Bureau of Investigation’s Additional Director A.Y.V. Krishna in the Supreme Court before a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud during a full-day hearing on Tuesday.
According to the 1995-batch IPS officer, the gang started their work three months ahead of the NEET exam. Their members started contacting parents of candidates in private meetings offering their services, while also on the hunt for “vulnerable” exam centres, mostly private schools, who would not mind giving them access to the sealed question papers in return for a tidy sum.
Compromised exam centre
Mr. Krishna said that the gang hit the jackpot with the Oasis School at Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. On May 5, once the papers were stored in the examination ‘control room’ at the school, secured inside a locked iron trunk which was in turn encased inside cardboard cartons, one of the gang, identified as ‘Pankaj’, sneaked in.
The CBI officer said that Pankaj had easily entered the school premises and was sitting patiently in a room hardly two feet away from the control room, waiting for the coast to clear. The centre coordinator at Oasis School had already hidden an “exhaustive tool kit” inside the control room to help Pankaj open the trunk locks.
It took Pankaj exactly one hour and twenty minutes to pry open the trunk, unseal the plastic wraps and click pictures of every page of the question paper, Mr. Krishna said.
The question paper was then resealed in its plastic wrap using a cigarette lighter and placed back in the trunk. Later, the student who received that particular question paper during the examination had wondered at the burnt marks on the plastic cover, Mr. Krishna said, reading from her statement.
72 cheques recovered
The clicked photographs were sent to another gang member waiting at a guesthouse with eight ‘problem solvers’ and ‘beneficiary’ students, who had already paid an advance amount for access to the questions. The rest of the amount would be realised after the students came out of the exam hall and confirmed that the leaked questions were the real deal. The CBI has so far recovered 72 post-dated cheques paid to the gang.
This gang member at the guesthouse took printouts of the questions and divided it among the problem solvers, who took approximately 45 minutes to complete their bit. Hard copies of the solved sheets were then given to the students to memorise before they left for their exam centres. Students had been divided into groups in Patna and Hazaribagh.
Unique number clue
The burnt scrap recovered initially by the Bihar police and handed over to the CBI was found on the ground at a high school where the Patna group had converged to memorise the questions and answers. The gang had tried to burn the question papers after the students had left.
However, the unique number on the burnt scrap had led the CBI to the girl student to whom the question paper was actually assigned.
“Every question paper has a unique number meant for each student. We traced the number found on the scrap in Patna to a candidate whose exam centre was in Hazaribagh. She was genuine. She had noticed the burnt mark on the resealed plastic wrap covering her paper but had kept silent. She later made a statement to us,” Mr. Krishna narrated to the court.
Unanswered questions
Chief Justice Chandrachud wondered aloud whether the photos of the questions were also sent to other locations. This would mean the leak was not confined to Patna and Hazaribagh.
The mobile used to send the photographs has still not been recovered and there is no forensic evidence to trace its electronic footprints. Besides, the “top gangster”, as Mr. Krishna referred to the gang leader, is still at large.
