As the NEET exam row continues to rage, sensational confessions to the Bihar Economic Offences Unit (EOU) have indicated widespread lapses in the conduct of the medical entrance examination this year. In their confessional statements, suspects said candidates paid exorbitant prices of over Rs 30 lakh in exchange for the leaked papers.
On Saturday, the agency issued notices to nine candidates asking them to arrive at their Patna office with evidence for questioning their association with the ‘solver gang’. All the candidates were from different districts of Bihar and were asked to arrive on Monday and Tuesday. The testing agency National Testing Agency (NTA) is yet to respond to the latest developments.
Lawyer seeks urgent listing of plea seeking probe in NEET ‘paper leak’
A lawyer representing 10 candidates who appeared in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2024 has written to the Supreme Court Registry seeking an urgent listing of their writ petition for an investigation into the “question paper leak”.
12 people were taken on 24-hour remand by the EOU investigating team on May 19 for interrogation. The aspirants told the team that the questions asked in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) were similar to that of the question paper they received on May 4 from lineman Sikander Yadavendu (56), a junior engineer in Danapur Nagar Parishad, who used to target people visiting his office.
Shortly after the National Testing Agency (NTA) successfully conducted the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET UG 2024) for undergraduates in 557 cities in India and 14 cities abroad, a copy of the NEET UG exam paper is circulating on the internet and thousands of It has started. Social media users claimed that the question paper has been leaked. Soon after the post went viral, exam takers started getting worried and requested the exam conducting body to take cognizance of the matter and investigate immediately
“According to the investigations, the mafia involved in compromising the exam picked up the candidates a day before the examination and kept them at a boys’ hostel on the outskirts of Patna. They kept their (candidates’) original documents with them and made them memorise the questions and answers,” Khan said.
“The candidates were then dropped at the examination centres to write the papers. Four such candidates have been nabbed so far and they have said that the questions in the NEET-UG completely tallied with the ones they were made to memorise,” Khan added.
Manavjit Singh Dhillon, deputy inspector general of EOU, said during the interrogation, the aspirants confessed that they were taken to a secluded house at Ramkrishna Nagar, which was rented by the linemen. “Around 35 aspirants were taken there on the evening of May 4 and provided with question papers on which answers were marked. The police recovered the burned question papers, which will be reconstructed by an FSL team, after which we will matched them with the original,” he said.
He added the names of six more aspirants, who hail from Bihar and other states, have come to the fore. “The other aspirants, who stayed at the rented room will be identified through the roll codes, which was recovered from the flat. We have sent the roll codes to the National Testing Agency, which conducted the exam, for details of the candidates,” he said. Sources said the EOU was trying to identify the gang, which provided the question papers to linemen.
