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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

TET postponed after paper leak, three held

Mumbai: In another shocker, the Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) question paper has ‘leaked’ - barely 24 hours before the scheduled examination on Sunday - jeopardising the future of thousands aspiring to join the noble profession of teaching, officials said here. Reacting quickly, the Maharashtra State Council of Examination cancelled Sunday’s paper scheduled to be held simultaneously at 1,028 centres across the state and said that the new date will be announced early next week. As...

TET postponed after paper leak, three held

Mumbai: In another shocker, the Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) question paper has ‘leaked’ - barely 24 hours before the scheduled examination on Sunday - jeopardising the future of thousands aspiring to join the noble profession of teaching, officials said here. Reacting quickly, the Maharashtra State Council of Examination cancelled Sunday’s paper scheduled to be held simultaneously at 1,028 centres across the state and said that the new date will be announced early next week. As many as six lakh candidates were scheduled to appear for the examination across 1,728 centres at 37 locations, officials said. The paper leak was detected and verified swiftly by Bhiwandi Police in Thane district which has arrested three alleged suspected, two from Bihar and one from Haryana, who were planning to hawk it for a staggering sum of Rs. 1.50 crore, suggesting the involvement of an inter-state gang behind the incident. Giving details, the Bhiwandi Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Dudhe said that the question paper was allegedly being ‘sold’ for a staggering Rs 1.50 crore, indicating a well-organised racket transcending the state border. He said that early on Saturday, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP-II) Dr. Pawan Bansod received a confidential tip-off and he immediately alerted senior officials who launched a discreet operation to track and apprehend the culprits. “An informant tipped us that the accused were travelling from New Delhi to Mumbai carrying copies of the TET question papers. After verification, we laid a trap and arrested the three suspects in Bhiwandi. However, the kingpin/s behind the racket remain absconding,” Dudhe said. Police said that the papers were to be sold for Rs 1.50 crore for which advance was reportedly collected from some persons. The arrested accused are: Rajiv Shah, 45 and Akash Kumar, 30, both of Patna in Bihar and Dheeraj Kumar, 28, of Panipat in Haryana. Four Sets Official sources said that the police sleuths accosted the suspected trio in a local hotel room where they were staying, questioned and searched them. They recovered four sets of purported copies of the crucial TET paper from them. Upon sustained questioning they admitted that these were the copies of the TET examination question paper of June 28. Experts from the MSCE were immediately summoned to confirm the documents recovered and the officials confirmed that many of the questions apparently were similar to those in the official TET exam paper of Sunday. Armed with the information, the Kongaon Police Station in Bhiwandi initially detained the trio, filed a case and then placed them under arrest. They are slapped with charges under the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita Sections 318(4), 316(5) and 61(2), besides stringent sections of the Maharashtra Examination Act, 2024, said Senior Police Inspector (HQ) Shailesh Salvi. As news of the paper leak spread like wildfire, thousands of candidates vent their ire before the mediapersons and on social media, demanding an overhaul of the public examinations monitoring systems and stringent punishment to the accused. SIT Formed The Thane Police have formed a 9-member SIT comprising Dr. Bansod, Sachin Sangle, Dr. Vinay Marathe and other officers, to investigate the source of the leak, identify the masterminds, and determine whether the network was linked with similar examination scams across the country. The TET paper leak comes days after the nationwide furore over the NEET 2026 exam paper leak with questions raised on the country’s public examinations system amid claims and assurances of tight security and monitoring. Congress, CJP flay govt Maharashtra Congress President Harshwardhan Sapkal and Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke pounced on the state government, accusing it of failing to safeguard the future of thousands of deserving candidates. They demanded a thorough probe and stringent action against everyone involved, lamenting how a series of examination scandals have damaged the credibility of the state’s education and public exams systems. “The government is not bothered. They are busy with breaking political parties. The so-called double-engine regime is to be blamed for the ‘double-leaks’ in such a short time. The education minister must resign,” demanded Dipke. The examination system has come under a cloud with several entrance and recruitment exams, including the NEET, UGC-NET, the Maharashtra TET and others cancelled or being probed in the past three years, triggering huge public outrage and raising question marks on the careers of lakhs of candidates.

Broken Merit


While India’s examination system has suffered leaks before, the cancellation of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) UG 2026 affecting more than 22 lakh students, represents the industrialisation of academic fraud. It signifies that former instances of isolated cheating have now acquired the architecture of organised crime.


The details emerging from the investigation are alarming not merely because a question paper was leaked, but because of the sophistication with which it appears to have travelled across India. According to investigators, the NEET paper circulated nearly 45 hours before the examination through encrypted messaging platforms, Telegram networks, portable scanners and shadow servers. The scandal began in Maharashtra’s Nashik before spreading through coaching circuits in Rajasthan, Haryana, Bihar, Kerala and beyond, resembling a black-market supply chain.


At the centre of the scam is a 30-year-old BAMS student from Nashik, accused of purchasing the leaked paper for Rs. 10 lakh and selling it onward for Rs. 15 lakh. Elsewhere, Rajasthan’s Special Operations Group arrested 15 individuals, including alleged masterminds linked to consultancy centres in Sikar, one of India’s most intense coaching hubs. Sikar, like Kota, has become emblematic of India’s examination-industrial complex, where aspiration is monetised at staggering scale.

The most troubling aspect of the scandal is the institutional frailty it exposes. Teachers in Rajasthan reportedly identified extraordinary overlaps between the leaked PDFs and the actual examination paper, and yet local police initially refused to register a complaint. Action only gathered pace after escalation to the National Testing Agency, the Intelligence Bureau and Rajasthan’s SOG. This reflects a chronic Indian ailment that institutions react only after scandal becomes impossible to suppress.


For millions of students, the consequences are devastating. NEET is a gateway to medicine, one of the few professions still viewed by many middle-class and lower-middle-class Indian families as a path to security, prestige and upward mobility. Aspirants spend years preparing for it, enduring punishing schedules, social isolation and immense psychological strain. A leaked paper corrodes faith in merit itself. That corrosion is dangerous in a country whose social contract increasingly rests upon competitive exams.


India has witnessed repeated paper leaks across recruitment and entrance examinations, from constable tests to teacher eligibility exams. Yet the leaks persist because the incentives remain enormous and the risks comparatively low. A single medical seat can transform a family’s fortunes. That creates a lucrative market for intermediaries willing to weaponize technology and desperation alike.


The NTA, established in 2017 to professionalise entrance examinations, now faces a credibility crisis. Conducting massive nationwide tests in the digital age now requires cyber-intelligence capabilities comparable to financial institutions.


India’s coaching economy must also come under sharper scrutiny. The hyper-commercialisation of competitive examinations has produced a parallel ecosystem while the line separating aggressive preparation from unethical advantage has steadily eroded. Unless the government imposes technological safeguards and institutional accountability, the NEET scandal will fade into the long catalogue of India’s forgotten examination frauds.

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