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

In April this year, two NEET-UG aspirants were sitting at a tea shop outside their coaching centre in Pune, discussing their apprehensions over the exam, when the shop’s owner approached them.

He told them that a friend of his, a “doctor”, could get the question paper for them, but it would cost Rs 4.5 lakh.

Sheshrao Bajrang Suryavanshi, owner of the tea stall Malak Chah, is the 14th accused arrested in the NEET-UG 2026 question paper leak case. The CBI chargesheeted him earlier this week for his alleged links with Shubham Khairnar, a career counsellor arrested in Nashik, Maharashtra, in May. Suryavanshi was arrested on September 2 by the CBI and sent to judicial custody after his three-day remand with the probe agency ended.

During the investigation, CBI found that Suryavanshi took at least 10 students to a house in Panchak village in Nashik and collected all their original documents and educational certificates as surety for payment.

“In mid-April this year, two of them were sitting in the shop and discussing the paper when they were approached by him. After striking a deal, on April 28, he took them to a house at Panchak village where they sat along with eight other students, and were given the alleged leaked questions for the NEET-UG examination, held on May 3. They studied them for the next three to four days,” a source said.

Further investigations revealed that all the students were allowed to leave the house on May 2 and were asked to return the papers containing the leaked questions. One of them discreetly scanned all the questions on his phone, the source said.

“After the examination, Suryavanshi approached one of the students and asked him to pay Rs 3 lakh in cash at his tea shop. The student’s mother arranged the money after mortgaging 35.8 grams of gold jewellery and handed it (the cash) over to him. He also asked another student for money, but that student kept buying time and did not pay anything,” a source said.

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The CBI scanned Suryavanshi’s phone and found a photograph of a girl, taken on April 30, holding photocopies of the leaked questions. It also traced how Khairnar, the career counsellor, arranged a rented accommodation for the students.

Khairnar had first met Nagesh Nanarao Dhande, who runs an educational consultancy firm in Nanded, in 2018. “In mid-April this year, Khairnar approached him (Dhande) saying he wanted to send some students for preparations before the final examination, and requested him to arrange a place for them for at least four days,” a source said. He was ready to pay Rs 75,000 for the place.

During one of their conversations, Khairnar told Dhande that he had a ‘guess paper’ for NEET-UG 2026. Dhande then approached a friend who runs a small grocery store and had a ground floor unit at Panchak village that was vacant. He paid Rs 15,000 as advance and shared Khairnar’s phone number with the grocery store owner.

The CBI found that Khairnar sent several PDF files containing questions to Dhande and asked him to take printouts. The files contained around 550-plus questions from Biology and Chemistry, and Dhande took eight sets of printouts from a photocopy shop.

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“He introduced himself to all the students as a doctor and handed them the question papers. Suryavanshi was asked to take photographs of the students holding the papers. Dhande later left the premises, and the next day he again received a PDF file of a Physics question paper and repeated the same exercise,” a source said.

The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) (NEET-UG 2026) examination held on May 3 this year was cancelled by the National Testing Agency due to a major question paper leak, causing distress to lakhs of students.