One of the key accused, Shivraj Raghunath Motegaonkar, the founder of Renukai Career Centre, has been sent to a 9 day custody by the CBI. It has been claimed that he was the individual through whom the paper was circulated to a large number of students.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has extended its probe into the alleged leak of question papers in the NEET-UG 2026 exam, expanding its probe to include parents and middlemen who allegedly paid high amounts of money to get leaked question papers for students appearing for medical entrance tests.
This is the latest move in the crackdown following the arrest of a Pune-based Botany professor, Manisha Mandhare, who was suspected to be a National Testing Agency (NTA) insider. Her arrest was issued by a Delhi court to hand her over to the CBI custody for 14 days while the investigators continue to trace the larger network behind the leak.
Now the investigation has gone beyond Maharashtra and extended to other states such as Rajasthan, agency sources said. In Nanded district of Maharashtra, the parents were allegedly questioned after the proof was obtained of them paying about ₹5 lakh to obtain leaked question papers for their daughter. The person has since been called to the CBI’s office in Pune for further interrogation.
In another significant addition to the list of coaching-related paper leaks in Rajasthan, CBI has arrested three suspects believed to be linked with the coaching.In the other breakthrough, the CBI arrested three persons in Rajasthan’s Sikar district suspected to have taken part in a paper leak syndicate involved in coaching. One father had paid nearly ₹10 lakh to the go-betweens who assured him of getting the ‘exact guess paper’ before the exam began, according to investigators.
The student, however, is said to have received leaked questions beforehand, and thus managed to secure just 107 out of the 720 marks in the all-important medical entrance exam.
A large network of insiders, coaching operators and brokers is believed to have operated in several states. The CBI is now conducting a money trail investigation and tracing of digital communications and connections between the accused to unravel the entire operation of the NEET paper leak.