Chai & a plate of NEET questions: CBI chargesheets tea stall owner in Pune

In April 2026, two NEET-UG aspirants were chatting at a tea stall outside their coaching center in Pune about their concerns regarding the upcoming exam. The owner of the tea stall, Sheshrao Bajrang Suryavanshi, approached them and claimed that a friend of his, a doctor named Shubham Khairnar, could provide them with the leaked question paper for a hefty price of Rs 4.5 lakh.

Suryavanshi, the 14th accused in the NEET-UG 2026 question paper leak case, was arrested by the CBI this week for his alleged connections with Khairnar.

The CBI discovered that Suryavanshi had taken at least ten students to a house in Panchak village, Nashik, and collected their original documents and educational certificates as collateral for the payment. After a three-day remand, he was sent to judicial custody. During the investigation, the students were given the leaked questions to study for three to four days before returning them on the second day.

Suryavanshi later approached one of the students and demanded Rs 3 lakh in cash at his tea shop, which his student's mother managed to pay by mortgaging 35.8 grams of gold jewelry. The CBI found a photograph on Suryavanshi's phone of a girl holding photocopies of the leaked questions taken on April 30. They also traced how Khairnar arranged rented accommodation for the students via his acquaintance, Nagesh Nanarao Dhande, an educational consultant based in Nanded.

In mid-April, Khairnar approached Dhande about sending students for NEET-UG 2026 exam preparation and requested him to arrange a place for them for at least four days, offering Rs 75,000 for the rental. Dhande then contacted a grocery store owner with a vacant ground floor unit in Panchak village, paying Rs 15,000 as advance, and shared Khairnar's phone number with him.

The CBI found several PDF files containing 550-plus questions from Biology and Chemistry, with Dhande taking eight sets of printouts from a photocopy shop. Khairnar introduced himself to the students as a doctor and handed them the question papers, with Suryavanshi tasked with taking photographs of them holding the papers.