NEETJaipur: Exam day was over. More than 22 lakh students across India had filled bubbles, and chased ranks, cut-offs and a shot at medicine. Then cheating came knocking — as a PDF attachment on a phone screen in Rajasthan’s coaching powerhouse of Sikar. One tired teacher opened it. Checked once. Checked again. Called a colleague. Sat through the night matching questions line by line. By dawn, NEET-UG 2026 was under a cloud. The exam had flunked its own test.Around 6pm on May 3, the chemistry teacher returned to his rented room after helping prepare answer keys for NEET. He was drained. Then came a casual warning. “My landlord told me, ‘Sir, there is some PDF going around.’ I checked it and was aghast,” said the teacher, who has spent 13 years coaching NEET aspirants in Sikar.At first glance, the paper looked suspiciously familiar. “As I matched chemistry questions in PDF with the actual paper, red flags appeared,” he said. “Questions were overloaded. Then I asked my landlord to check whether biology questions were there too. As it turned out, there were biology questions as well.”Exam-season rumours are common in coaching hubs where panic spreads faster than notes before finals. He didn’t dismiss this one. Instead, he picked up the phone and called a biology faculty colleague. Through the night, they cross-checked the leaked PDF against the actual NEET paper — line by line, question by question, answer by answer.By midnight, puzzle pieces had snapped into place. “Paper was leaked. I knew it,” he said.Around 12.30am on May 4, he walked into a police station hoping to lodge a complaint. Police advised him to return after compiling complete supporting material, he said. “There may have been loose ends, so I returned from the police station and continued examining the material,” he said.Back in his room, scrutiny resumed. Screenshots, comparisons, matching sequences — evidence stacked up like solved test sheets before results day. By evening of May 6, he had emailed National Testing Agency (NTA) and alerted CBI. “By May 7, I had begun getting responses from NTA. Ministry of home affairs also got in touch with me,” he said.Then came a pause. “You know what happened after that,” he said.On May 12, NTA cancelled NEET-UG 2026 following allegations of widespread malpractice and paper leak linked to the exam conducted on May 3.For the teacher, a decision to speak up carried another weight: lakhs of students staring at shattered timelines, repeated preparation cycles and another year under coaching-centre fluorescent lights. “I knew lakhs of students who had spent two to three years preparing for NEET-UG would have their dreams crushed,” he said. “They spent endless nights studying and compromised both their mental and physical health for this exam. I could not sit quietly.”The scandal cast a harsh glare on Sikar, one of India’s fastest-growing coaching corridors, often compared with Kota for its swelling ranks of engineering and medical aspirants.The teacher bristled at suggestions that the city’s strong NEET performance pointed to something crooked beneath surface. “Sikar has developed an excellent education system over the years — good faculty, disciplined preparation systems and strong coaching centres. It is wrong to blame Sikar,” he said.He rejected whispers that success itself had become suspect. “Some people are suggesting that because Sikar performed very well in recent years, there must be something suspicious behind it. That is unfair. Sikar proved its mettle through hardworking students and teachers,” he said, insisting the city should not become a poster child for a cheating scandal that cut across layers far beyond one coaching town.
