NEW DELHI: From the absence of frisking and checking in the “confidential section” of the NTA and lack of proper CCTV monitoring, to the involvement of the same set of people for different stages of paper finalisation, the CBI has flagged a series of profoundly prosaic security lapses that led to the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak, sparked the Cockroach Janta Party protest, and eventually forced Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.
In its 94-page chargesheet filed before the special court, the CBI redflagged the lack of compartmentalisation in NTA’s workflow, allowing a person to get access to the complete final papers.
The workflow involved four crucial stages - item writing, moderation, vetting and translation. Ideally, these steps should be done by different experts handling each phase to prevent any single individual from grasping the exam’s full scope.
“However … it is found that many experts have been involved in multiple stages. Further, from the moderation step onwards, the experts concerned have full access to final sets of questions. This is particularly so in the translation/ back-translation stage, as here a single expert can see all four of the final master sets,” it said.
The CBI has chronicled the startlingly porous environment in the ‘Confidential Section’ of NTA, where question papers for the high-stakes undergraduate medical course admission are prepared.
The absence of basic security detail like checking or frisking of experts who entered or exited the confidential section allowed chemistry expert PV Kulkarni, said to be the mastermind of the leak, to transcribe 135 questions onto “small chits of paper” and smuggle them to his hotel room “unnoticed” for three days while he was working there, it alleged.
The other two accused lecturers - Manisha Gurunath Mandhare for zoology and botany, and Manisha Sanjay Havaldar for physics - on the NTA panel allegedly exploited the loopholes in the workflow of the paper finalisation and managed to recreate the final paper with unprecedented accuracy, which they sold to a close group of students for a substantial sum.
But these questions were allegedly accessed by Manisha Waghmare, a beautician, who planted some students in these special classes conducted Kulkarni and Mandhare. By using the notebooks of these students, she also created a question paper and sold it through a series of middlemen. One paper landed in the hands of an aspirant who complained about the paper leak to the NTA, which blew the lid on the scam.
Another major oversight is the lack of a dedicated, live-feed monitoring control room for the confidential section. Making matters worse, NTA maintains CCTV footage for only 20-25 days. As the work was completed on April 7 and the case was booked on May 12, there is no footage available for the investigators.