In addition to Ranjan, the CBI has also arrested eight people.
The CBI has arrested the alleged kingpin in the NEET exam paper leak case.
Rakesh ‘Rocky’ Ranjan has subsequently been remanded in custody for 10 days.
This comes as the CBI raided four locations – two near Patna in Bihar and two near Kolkata in West Bengal.
Over a dozen people, including the principal and vice-principal of a school in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh, have been arrested so far, as various state police forces and the CBI investigate a national racket that involves leaking of question papers for exams like NEET.
In addition to Ranjan, the CBI has also arrested eight people.
Tasked with investigating the nationwide exam paper racket, the agency has filed six FIRs, including five for three separate cases in Bihar.
A CBI spokesperson said the NEET exam paper leak may have originated in the Hazaribagh school. Papers leaked from there also made their way to Bihar.
Explaining the sequence of events, the CBI official said nine sets of exam papers, which were supposed to be held on May 5, reached a State Bank of India branch two days earlier for safekeeping.
From there, two sets were transported to the Oasis School in Hazaribagh, which was a centre for the exam, and the seals on them were broken by the time they reached the school.
It is reported that Ranjan was present when the question papers were unsealed.
He took photos of the questions and shared them with ‘solver gangs’, the name given to an organised racket that provides answers to leaked papers.
These were then shared with exam candidates in exchange for payment.
Ranjan is associated with Sanjeev Mukhiya, who has been involved in this scam for two decades and is on the run.
Ranjan’s arrest could bust the NEET case wide open even as the courts debate the extent of the leak of question papers.
The government and the testing agencies both say the leak has been limited to localised regions and a few students.
According to the CBI, while it is unclear where exactly the papers were leaked from, it is clear that it was either from the bank branch, while in transit to the school, or from the school itself.
The NEET-UG exam is taken for admission to undergraduate medical courses.
There was controversy in June 2024 when there was an abnormally high number of perfect scores.
A retest was held but hundreds of students did not turn up.
The Supreme Court served a notice to the National Testing Agency (NTA).
The NTA defended itself against claims the NEET paper had been leaked on Telegram, calling the images “fake”.
In an affidavit, the NTA said the screenshots shared on Telegram were “fabricated”.
When asked to explain why there were an unusually high number of high-scoring results in this year’s exam, the NTA claimed “differences in new and old editions” of a textbook meant there were two correct options to one question.
The court is hearing a clutch of petitions seeking a cancellation of the NEET-UG 2024 exam.
But the court said it was not necessary for such a step, adding that a retest is the “last option”.
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