Who vetted NEET re-test biometric verifiers? Not NTA, RTI reveals

Bihar's NEET dummy candidate racket has put biometric verification under scrutiny. An India Today RTI reveals that NTA outsourced the hiring and vetting of biometric staff to EdCIL, even as the agency probes alleged impersonation and authentication irregularities linked to three re-test centres. Who vetted NEET’s biometric verifiers? India Today’s RTI reveals it wasn’t NTA (Image: PTI)Every candidate who walked into a NEET-UG re-test examination hall this year was told the same thing: place your finger on the scanner, and the system would confirm you were really you. But who was standing behind that scanner, and who had checked their credentials before giving them that responsibility?In response to an RTI filed by India Today, the NTA revealed details of how biometric verification at three exam centres in Bihar came under scrutiny amid an alleged dummy candidate racket.THE RACKET BIHAR POLICE UNCOVEREDAccording to a news report dated June 24, the NEET-UG re-test, held after the original May 3 exam was cancelled over a paper-leak controversy, was meant to be the clean version. Instead, Bihar Police said they had busted a "dummy candidate" racket operating out of three centres in Lakhisarai district: KRK College, Kendriya Vidyalaya, and Hasanpur High School.Thirty people have been arrested so far. Nine of them are alleged "dummy candidates", men already enrolled in MBBS and other professional courses, police say, who sat the exam in place of real aspirants. One is a genuine candidate accused of arranging his own stand-in. Two more are alleged accomplices. And 18, the largest group by far, are biometric verification staff, the people whose job was to stop exactly this from happening.According to that report, Lakhisarai SP Prerna Kumar named two fourth-year MBBS students as central to the operation: Arpit Singh of Muzaffarpur, allegedly the link between an interstate "solver gang" and paying candidates, and Mayank Kashyap of Vaishali, who is a fourth-year MBBS student working with the biometric team. To get past the checks, the accused allegedly used forged documents and fake Aadhaar cards as identity proof.WHAT THE RTI REVEALEDThe arrests raised an obvious question: who hired these biometric staff in the first place, and what checks were run on them? India Today put that question to the NTA through an RTI.The response revealed a chain of outsourcing that ends well short of the exam hall.NTA does not hire or vet biometric staff itself. It has a Memorandum of Understanding with a central government company, EdCIL (India) Limited, which is responsible for engaging and checking the actual vendors on the ground.Asked what due diligence NTA conducted before these agencies were engaged, its reply was blunt: since the MoU exists between NTA and EdCIL, NTA "does not directly deal with any third-party vendors."In effect, the agency running India's biggest medical entrance exam has no direct line of accountability to the people physically verifying every candidate's identity.The RTI reply also confirmed something Bihar's arrests now make hard to ignore: an inquiry into this year's biometric-related irregularities, malpractice, impersonation, or candidate authentication issue is already underway at NTA's end.NTA said no biometric agency for NEET 2026 had been blacklisted or under investigation at the time contracts were awarded, and that none has since been penalised or terminated.- EndsPublished By: Apoorva AnandPublished On: Aug 10, 2026 12:15 IST