The National Testing Agency's exam security strategy turned out to have one flaw: it trusted the people who wrote the exam.
The National Testing Agency asked Professor P.V. Kulkarni, a chemistry lecturer at Dayanand Medical College in Latur and one of its own paper-setting panelists, to help design NEET-UG 2026. He did. He also dictated the entire Chemistry section — questions and all four answer options — to handpicked students at his Pune residence for ₹2 to 5 lakh per head, 45 hours before the exam. On May 15, the CBI arrested him as the operation's kingpin. A day later, they arrested biology lecturer Manisha Gurunath Mandhare — another NTA panelist — for running the same scheme for Biology. Forensic comparison showed the handwritten notes given to students exactly tallied with the printed exam. Nine people have been arrested so far and the exam cancelled. The NTA, which had already survived the 2024 NEET scandal, has now made history by having its paper setters leak the papers they personally set — which is either a catastrophic vetting failure or a very efficient single-vendor supply chain.