Sikar lecturer’s plaint blew lid off test scam – The Tribune

Long before arrests, raids and a nationwide uproar over the alleged NEET-2026 paper leak, a chemistry teacher from Rajasthan quietly walked into a police station carrying what he believed was evidence that India’s biggest medical entrance test had been compromised. That teacher was Shashikant Suthar.

Associated with Guru Kripa Coaching Institute in Sikar and originally from Nohar in Hanumangarh district, Suthar is now emerging as one of the earliest whistleblowers in the scandal that eventually forced the authorities to cancel the exam for over 22 lakh students.

According to Suthar, suspicion first arose on May 3, the day NEET was conducted, when an acquaintance showed a viral PDF circulating online as a “guess paper” and casually asked whether any of its questions had appeared in the actual examination.

Suthar said he sat down with the chemistry section of the NEET-2026 paper and started comparing it question by question with the viral PDF. The similarities, he claimed, were impossible to ignore. To remove any doubt, he used artificial intelligence tools to compare both documents digitally. “The chemistry questions matched exactly,” he claimed. The discovery left him shaken.

Instead of dismissing it as coincidence, Suthar said he spent hours rechecking every detail before deciding to alert the authorities. Late that night, he reached Udyog Nagar police station in Sikar and attempted to report the matter.

According to him, officers asked him to file a written complaint in a prescribed format, but the process stretched late into the night. Unwilling to let the matter die, Suthar later emailed the NTA and several government authorities, warning them about a possible leak.

He claimed officials from the NTA contacted him soon after they saw his email. Teams from Rajasthan’s Special Operations Group later visited him for questioning, while central agencies, including the CBI, also reportedly recorded his statement as the investigation widened across states.