The agency said that Manisha Waghmare, a Pune-based beautician acting as a “facilitator” for all NEET subjects, helped add members to this online group. She offered students both online and offline Chemistry and Botany classes from subject experts contracted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for translation and proofreading — namely Kulkarni and Mandhare. She claimed these classes would “provide students with identical questions from the NEET-UG exam,” the agency said.
Event Context
Delving into how the classes proceeded, the chargesheet stated, “During Biology classes, accused Manisha Mandhare (A-1) instructed the students to mark specific paragraphs in their new XI and XII NCERT textbooks and also dictated questions to be written in the margins of their new textbooks”.
After the class, the students wrote the dictated questions in a fair notebook, which Mandhare then “corrected” as required, the agency claimed.
Team Analysis
The CBI stated that Mandhare conducted these “revision offline classes” for Biology at her residence in Ganga Osian, Pune, during two separate periods: November to December of 2025 and again from March to April of 2026.
Investigation into the online group revealed that students arranged by Waghmare who attended Mandhare’s classes also attended Chemistry expert PV Kulkarni’s classes
“As per the statement of a group member, the Biology and Chemistry questions provided by the accused Manisha Mandhare (A-1) and accused PV Kulkarni (A-2), respectively, matched those in the actual NEET-UG 2026 examination…”
Based on this evidence, the federal agency arrested Kulkarni and Mandhare on May 15 and 16 respectively.
Investigation subsequently revealed the role of Manisha Havaldar, a Physics subject expert who was arrested for allegedly leaking 66 handwritten questions to students arranged by Waghmare for monetary benefit.
The chargesheet said Waghmare’s husband’s dental clinic in Pune became a place where leaked questions for different subjects were coordinated and processed. Statements from witnesses confirmed that typing work occurred at Manisha Waghmare’s dental clinic. The digital evidence recovered from her showed leaked question material in multiple subjects — Biology, Chemistry, Physics — was stored, handled and circulated by her,” the CBI said.
