NEET-UG 2024 paper leak: Hazaribagh to Patna, and why the Supreme Court refused a re-exam

On 5 May, the Economic Offences Unit of the Bihar Police raided a school in Khemnichak, Patna, and seized half-burnt question papers of the NEET-UG examination.¹

Half-burnt. Paper that had already been burnt before anyone reached it.

The unit said those seized papers were later matched with question papers of an examination centre at a school in Hazaribagh, in Jharkhand.¹ That match is an allegation, and it is the allegation the whole criminal case rests on: that what was found on a school floor in one state was the same paper candidates were sitting in another.

Then hold it against what a bench said in open court.

The fact that sanctity of exam has been compromised is beyond doubt. It is an admitted fact that there is a leak and the nature of the leak is something that we are determining

Not a petitioner's claim. Not a report. A court recording that the leak was admitted, with what remained to be determined being its nature.

Nobody in this piece is called guilty. The criminal case is before the courts, and what follows is what the documents say.

So the leak is not the open question. The open question is what a conceded leak actually got the candidates who sat that paper, and what it cost everyone who did not.

The scale on both sides of the scale

About 23,33,297 candidates sat NEET-UG 2024.³ It was held on 5 May at 4,750 centres across 571 cities.⁴ At the other end of it, 1,08,000 seats are available for the MBBS course through NEET.⁴

There is no second door. The examination is the gateway for admissions into MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and related courses, in government and private institutions across the country.² If a state board paper is compromised, one board reschedules. Here there is no other board to fall back on.

The scoring explains where the pressure comes from. Four marks are awarded for each correct answer and one mark deducted for each incorrect one,⁴ against a maximum of 720.⁴ Getting a question right and getting it wrong are not one mark apart, they are five. And a rank list is not a set of bands. It is one ordered line of more than 23 lakh candidates, with seats handed down it until they run out. A single mark moves a candidate past others, and a seat moves with them.

That arithmetic cuts both ways, which is the whole difficulty. The same scale that makes a compromised paper serious makes a cancellation serious. Ordering a retest means asking 23,33,297 candidates to sit again, arranging 4,750 centres in 571 cities a second time, and pushing back the admissions calendar for every one of those 1,08,000 seats.

So the question before the court was never simply whether something went wrong. It was one of proportion: if papers at a small number of centres out of 4,750 were compromised, does the examination for all 23,33,297 fall with them?

What the investigation says happened to the paper

The CBI has said it recovered half-burnt pieces of the question paper at a school in Patna,⁵ and that those pieces led investigators to the OASIS School in Hazaribagh.⁵ Nothing about burnt paper on a floor announces where it came from. On the agency's account somebody had to read what survived, match it, and follow it backwards, out of Bihar and into Jharkhand.

What the investigation states it then found is that the NEET-UG 2024 question paper was stolen from the control room of that school.⁵ A control room is the room at a centre where sealed trunks of question papers are held before they are given out. The investigation puts the theft on 5 May, and states the paper was taken after the trunks containing the papers had arrived from the bank vault.⁵ The claim is not that the papers never made that journey. It is that the paper was taken after they arrived.

On the wider case, the Economic Offences Unit states that question papers were leaked from the Hazaribagh centre and distributed to suspected candidates at different places by an inter-state organised gang.¹ Every part of that sentence is an allegation and not a finding. None of it has been tested at a trial, and the people described are suspected candidates in the agency's own words.

The method alleged is what makes the case hard to prove or disprove. The investigation states the solved question paper was distributed to candidates gathered at a guest house in Hazaribagh.⁵ A solved paper is the question paper with the answers already worked out, so nothing has to be attempted, only read and remembered. It further alleges the paper was scanned and sent digitally to predetermined locations where members of the gang received it,⁵ that only those who had paid in advance were allowed into those locations,⁵ and that after their sessions candidates were not permitted to take any printed copies away with them.⁵

That last rule is not housekeeping. If no printed copy left with a candidate, then the object an investigator would most want to find on a person, a sheet carrying the questions and the answers, is precisely what the arrangement is alleged to have been designed never to release.

A count that does not reconcile

On 24 June the investigation changed hands, passing from the Economic Offences Unit of the Bihar Police to the CBI.¹

After the handover the CBI made its first arrest in the case, arresting two persons in connection with alleged irregularities in the examination,¹ reported as arrested from Patna.¹ At that point 17 arrests had taken place in the case in Bihar,¹ of which 15 were attributed to the Economic Offences Unit.¹

Notice what that does not say. It gives a Bihar total and an agency share. It does not date those 15 against the 24 June handover, does not say who made the remaining two, and does not say whether the CBI's two from Patna sit inside the 17 or outside it. A figure that looks precise, resting on a boundary that is not.

Then the count itself stops agreeing with itself. A press release reportedly issued by the Economic Offences Unit stated that 13 persons had been arrested in Patna in connection with the paper leak.⁴ Against that, the Additional Director General of Police of that same unit issued a communication stating that the unit had not released an official press statement about the arrests.⁴

Read the second one for what it does not say. It does not say the count was wrong. It says there was no official statement at all.

Both are on the record and this piece does not settle which is correct, because the documents do not. The disagreement is not between the police and an outside critic. It is between a press release attributed to a unit and a communication from that unit's own senior officer, about how many people were picked up.

Out of Bihar

The CBI later arrested three more persons in the case.⁶ Two of them are described by the agency as medical students at a college in Rajasthan,⁶ people the investigation places inside a medical college already rather than among brokers or couriers. According to sources, technical surveillance confirmed the presence of those two in Hazaribagh on the day of the examination.⁶ Note how thin that attribution is: not a court finding, not a chargesheet read in open hearing, but what sources told reporters the surveillance showed. The third person is described as providing support to the alleged organiser of the case.⁶

By a later count the CBI had arrested ten accused, from Delhi, Jaipur, Gurugram, Nasik, Pune, Latur and Ahilyanagar.⁷ Read that list slowly. Rajasthan, Haryana, Maharashtra, the capital. Hazaribagh and Patna are still in the story but are no longer the whole of it. In one 24-hour period the agency also searched five locations and seized documents, laptops and mobile phones which it described as incriminating,⁷ none of which has been weighed by a court.

One sentence in the agency's own account goes further than any other. It states that the investigation conducted so far has brought out the actual source of the leakage of the chemistry and biology papers, which were circulated before the examination.⁷ Not the couriers. The source. That is the CBI describing its own progress, untested in a courtroom.

What the Court asked for

By an interim order dated 8 July 2024 the Supreme Court called for disclosures on affidavit from the National Testing Agency, the Union of India and the CBI.³ An interim order is a direction given while a case is still running, usually to get facts on the record, and an affidavit is a written statement on oath.

Multiple appeals had sought a direction to recall the results and conduct the examination afresh, citing paper leaks and irregularities in the 5 May examination.⁸ The bench, led by the Chief Justice of India with Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra,⁹ sought details from the agency about the centres and cities where the leak occurred, the methods used to identify beneficiaries, and the channels by which the paper was disseminated.²

Sit with the word beneficiaries. The question is not only who took the paper out. It is who sat in a hall having already seen it.

The Court also sought a status report from the CBI on its investigation,² and the agency filed status reports dated 10, 17 and 21 July 2024.³ An Additional Director of the CBI apprised the Court on the status of the investigation in person.³

One hundred and fifty-five

As of 23 July 2024 the CBI's investigation material indicated that about 155 students, drawn from the examination centres at Hazaribagh and Patna, appear to be beneficiaries of the fraud.³

Hold the wording. Appear to be. This is what an investigating agency has stated, not something proved against anyone, and the probe into those students was still running.

That number is what the hearing turned on, and the bench set out its own test. It said it would scrutinise whether the breach occurred at a systemic level,² and that a retest may be necessary if the breach affected the entire process and the beneficiaries could not be isolated.² That cuts both ways. If the people who gained can be separated out, the rest of the examination stands. If they cannot, the whole of it is in question. Against that the bench noted it was dealing with 23 lakh students in weighing whether to order a retest.²

So the question was narrow and enormous at once: are about 155 candidates a group that can be isolated, or the visible edge of a breach that reached the process itself?

The data, and the objections to it

Pursuant to the Court's direction the Union Government produced a data analytics report from IIT Madras on examination trends.³ The Court asked for it; it was not volunteered. A data analytics report is not an investigation into any candidate. It is a study of patterns across the whole examination.

The petitioners attacked it on who wrote it, objecting to the report on the grounds of alleged bias³ and alleging that the Director of IIT Madras was unreliable on it because of a conflict of interest, being a member of the General Body of the NTA.⁴ The Union of India and the agency submitted there was no such conflict, because he sits there only ex officio, by virtue of an office he already holds.⁴ That submission is recorded as disputed.

The petitioners also alleged reports of a six-day delay in transporting the question papers to Hazaribagh, arguing it raised concerns about possible tampering.⁴ That argument does not assert tampering. It says the papers sat somewhere, and that the gap is itself a question the record has to answer. On the leak, the agency submitted that there was no leak of the question paper via Telegram,⁴ a submission by a party rather than a finding, and also disputed.

Then the Court's own conclusion on the numbers. It found that the comparison of data for 2022, 2023 and 2024 was not indicative of a systemic leak of the question paper.³ Three years of results lined up against each other, without the signature of a paper that had gone out widely.

And the part that is easy to miss, because it cuts both ways: the Court acknowledged confirmed instances of leaks at Hazaribagh and Patna, while holding that these isolated incidents did not indicate a systemic failure.¹⁰ It did not say nothing happened. It declined the leap from those two places to the whole country. Confirmed, but contained. The entire no-retest position stands or falls on one word, isolated.

The one thing the Court did move

Arguments were heard over four days.³ Of everything pressed, the record shows a result on one ground, and it is worth seeing which.

The agency's answer key initially indicated the fourth option as correct on one disputed physics question.³ An answer key is the official list of correct options, and every sheet is marked against it. The agency then decided that both the second and the fourth options would be treated as correct.³ One question, one official answer, and then two.

Here the Court neither accepted the position nor left it alone. By an order dated 22 July 2024 it requested the Director of IIT Delhi to constitute a three-member committee to give an opinion on the correct answer.³ The committee comprised Professors Pradipta Ghosh, Aditya Narain Agnihotri and Sankalpa Ghosh.³ Their opinion was that option four was correct.³ The Court accepted the report⁴ and directed the agency to revise the result on that basis and to update the ranks of all candidates.³

Not the ranks of those who got the question wrong. Not the ranks of those who complained. All candidates. That is what a rank list is: one ordered line, every position relative to every other. Move the marks under one question and the line reorders above and below, whether or not a candidate ever attempted it.

The Court also told the agency it must avoid the flip-flops it had done in this case, which do not serve the interests of students.¹¹ Flip-flop is the Court's own word for one answer, then two, then professors asked to settle what should have been settled before the paper was printed.

The exam stood

On 23 July 2024 the Supreme Court held that the standard for cancellation had not been met and that a re-test was not warranted.⁴

The reasoning was that cancellation is a high bar the material did not reach. The Court found an absence of material on record to conclude that the entire result stood vitiated, or that there was a systemic breach in the examination's sanctity.³ Vitiated means spoiled to the point of being invalid, so the question was never whether something went wrong somewhere, but whether the whole paper was spoiled. The bench found no systemic breach beyond the Hazaribagh and Patna centres and on that basis ruled out a retest.¹⁰ Ordering cancellation of the entire examination was not justified,³ and the pleas were dismissed.¹⁰

The Court then set out what a retest would have cost, saying a fresh examination for over 23 lakh students would have serious consequences, disrupting the academic schedule and causing a cascading effect in coming years.¹⁰ The judgment was authored by the Chief Justice of India.⁴

The finding is about how far the damage travelled, not about whether those two centres were clean.

Where the criminal case sits

First information reports registered over the leak in Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Bihar were transferred to the CBI for investigation.³ Such a report is only the first police record of a complaint. It records an allegation and settles nothing.

The next step is a charge sheet, the document an investigating agency files saying it believes it has enough material to put named people on trial. A third charge sheet was filed before the Special Court for CBI cases in Patna against 21 accused,¹² under sections of the Indian Penal Code including criminal conspiracy, abetment, criminal breach of trust, cheating, theft, causing disappearance of evidence, and dishonestly receiving stolen property.¹²

Everything in a charge sheet is an accusation by the investigating agency. Naming someone in one is not a finding of guilt, and on this record the correct word for each of those people is accused. This piece does not name them.

Both of these are true

Go back to the half-burnt papers.

The Supreme Court held that it was not in dispute that a leak of the NEET-UG 2024 paper took place at Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and at Patna in Bihar.³ Not alleged. Not under investigation. Not in dispute. The Court described what happened as two localised leaks of the question papers, in Patna and Hazaribagh,¹³ and localised is the single word that carried most of the weight in the outcome.

The Court allowed the transfer petitions filed by the agency and others raising the validity of the examination,³ which moves cases filed in different High Courts to one court so they are heard together. And the last door closed too: the Supreme Court dismissed the review petition seeking reconsideration of its decision not to hold a fresh examination.¹³

On the criminal side this piece says nothing about who did what, because the documents do not settle it. Those named face a process that has not tested the allegations against them, and until it does they remain allegations.

So the question that stays open is not what happened. It is what an admitted leak changes for the examination that comes next, if it did not change this one.

Because both of these are true at the same time. The leak was admitted. The exam stood.

MangoPOV. "NEET-UG 2024 paper leak: Hazaribagh to Patna, and why the Supreme Court refused a re-exam." 8 September 2026. https://mangopov.in/stories/neet-ug-2024-paper-leak/

@misc{mangopov-neet-ug-2024-paper-leak,
  title        = {NEET-UG 2024 paper leak: Hazaribagh to Patna, and why the Supreme Court refused a re-exam},
  author       = {{MangoPOV}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mangopov.in/stories/neet-ug-2024-paper-leak/}},
}