It officially concludes that there was no organised leak or conspiracy in the suspected UGC-NET paper leak case from June 2024 and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has closed its probe in the matter, officials confirmed today. It was found that a student had even managed to fool the question paper screenshot to give the impression he had accessed it and was seeking the money.
After receiving inputs that the question paper of the UGC-NET June 18, 2024 exam was being sold on Telegram for a fee, authorities had to cancel the exam the next day. Shortly after, the matter was passed on to the CBI, which then lodged a First Information Report (FIR) to probe the alleged leak.
In the probe, it was found that the screenshot of the leaked question paper was doctored using an app. An image and a date and time stamp appeared on the paper, and a student changed the image to make it look as though the paper was looked at before the exam. The CBI consulted the forensic experts, who had confirmed that there was no true leak.
“The doctored document was published on Telegram an hour before the second shift and spread to a person so that people think the paper had leaked,” said an official working on the investigation. “The case has been closed since there proved no evidence that the alleged leak benefited any of these candidates,” another officer said.
Unsold marks and qualifying exams of UGC-NET are used to determine eligibility for Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), assistant professor positions and PhD admissions at any Indian university. The June 2024 exam was registered by more than 11 lakh candidates.
The possibility of a security breach had been flagged by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and was feared by the National Cyber Crime Threat Analytics Unit, and the competition was cancelled. However, with no strong evidence of wrongdoing, the CBI’s work on the case has now been closed, highlighting the integrity of the system.
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