These Exams Mean Everything in India. Thieves See a Gold Mine

Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar

The call arrived  it was go time. The medical doctor rushed to the airport, bound for a midnight operation hundreds of miles away in western India. But this mission was not about saving lives. The doctor carried a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a blade and a cellphone  tools for a heist. His target was something worth more than gold in India’s cutthroat competition for government jobs and university placements: the question sheets for a police constable exam.

After landing in the city of Ahmedabad, the doctor, Shubham Mandal, was hurried to a freight warehouse on its outskirts, according to police documents and interviews with the lead investigator by The New York Times. To avoid surveillance cameras, Mandal climbed through a back window into a room stacked with boxes. There, police say, he pried open one marked “confidential” and took out an envelope. He used his phone’s camera to photograph each page inside before resealing the envelope and locking the box. He would repeat the exercise at least once in the nights that followed, as new sheets arrived at the warehouse from the printing house, in between staying at a one-star hotel nearby. Waiting in a car each time were three men, including, police say, the burglary’s mastermind, Ravi Atri.

Atri saw himself as part criminal, part Robin Hood. He had taken the national medical school entrance exam five times, and ultimately passed, but never became a doctor. Instead, he turned to stealing tests to help others. No job was too small for him and his gang. He had previously had a hand in leaking questions on exams for nursing jobs, banking jobs, teaching jobs and slots at vocational institutes, police say, and had been jailed at least twice.

The constable exam, his latest quarry, would be taken in February of this year by nearly 5 million people vying for 60,000 vacancies in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Atri’s home base. A new constable is paid about $400 a month. But even the lowest-paid government jobs in India are coveted for their stability, and aspirants endure months of grueling study in expensive tuition centers to prepare for the exams that govern hiring.

Atri offered a leg up. And now, with the constable test in his hands, the race was on. Atri sent the signal to his vast network of local agents in Uttar Pradesh. They had already booked a big restaurant hall and a lush resort where thousands of his clients would be bused in for a crash course in the answers. They just had to avoid getting caught.

“If this works, you will get so much money that you will not need to do anything else in your life,” Atri told one of the warehouse workers he had patiently cultivated to get access to the exam, according to a police report. “And you will also get a government job.”

Allotting jobs on the basis of exam results conveys a sense of fairness. But with competition so fierce, the temptation to seek shortcuts can be strong. Some aspirants, while spending long hours in study groups, also keep an eye out for shadowy figures offering access to exams. They exchange phone numbers with local agents; negotiate tentative prices, often in the hundreds of dollars or more; and pray that the scheme succeeds.

“When 4 million students prepare for an exam, half of those would also be busy searching for a leaked paper — not just them, their parents, their grandparents, everyone,” said Brijesh Kumar Singh, a senior police officer in the city of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh who investigates organized crime, with much of his time spent on gangs pursuing exam leaks.

An investigation by one of India’s largest newspapers, found that more than 40 examinations had been compromised by leaks over the past five years, affecting 14 million aspirants in 15 states. This year, the national exam for seats in medical schools faced widespread questions after an unusual number of the 2 million candidates achieved perfect scores. As the government tried to contain the fallout from that case, it canceled a national exam for graduate school fellowships and junior positions at universities because of a leak.

Protesters camped outside the home of the education minister in New Delhi. The anger only grew when two young men who had been preparing for an exam drowned in a basement study center as the streets flooded after overnight rain.

“We are working hard for several years, and rich students are taking advantage of the system by spending money,” Harsh Dubey, 22, who had been attempting to pass the medical school entrance test for four years, said during a protest in Delhi.

Singh, the police officer in Meerut, explained the exam breaches as a pyramid model. At the top is the procurer of the leak. Below him are middlemen. They work with agents at the village level, who recruit customers. Before the constable test heist, Atri had been introduced to Mandal, who, the police say, would become his hired thief.

His story is similar to Atri’s: Even as he was studying for a medical degree, which he completed in 2021, he kept one foot in the lucrative world of exam leaks. Mandal eventually became known in test-theft circles for his precise box-opening skills. He landed in jail in 2017 for helping to leak a medical exam, police records show.

This year, as Mandal performed his day job at a health clinic in the state of Bihar, Atri had him on standby. If Atri heard about a shipment of question sheets from one of the people he had on retainer along the supply chain, Mandal would get a call.

The call for the Ahmedabad job had come, Atri’s clients had taken the constable test — and Mandal wanted his money. But there was a problem: After the exam had been administered, news got out that the questions had been leaked.

That alone did not mean that Mandal, who police say had been promised a final payment of about $20,000 for stealing the test, would not be compensated. According to his agreement with Atri, he would be paid as long as the exam results were not canceled. That usually happens only when a leak is found to be widespread.

It was; the results were canceled. Atri stopped answering Mandal’s calls. Atri’s racket had been busted through routine police work. While investigating another leak case, police found evidence of the constable test breach.

The police essentially worked their way from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, tracing the leak from a village-level agent up the chain to Atri and Mandal. “We found in their phone the papers for the U.P. constable exam  and when we checked the timing, it was before the exam,” said Singh, who was the case’s chief investigative officer.

Officials in Uttar Pradesh said there would be a retest with different questions — this time, a higher-security affair. A repeat leak would be a humiliation.

On the day of the new exam, a police officer named Raghvendra Kumar Mishra had the difficult task of making sure it went well in Meerut. The graveyard of confiscated motorcycles outside his office spoke of his usual job — he is in charge of the city’s traffic. His large office was a makeshift war room. Half a dozen officers watched footage from the 36 centers where the examination was taking place. At one exam center, police officers checked documents as a line of students made their way under a billboard advertising a hair tonic for balding.

“Only pens allowed,” a police officer kept announcing through a megaphone. “Shoes in your hand when you enter. Belts not allowed inside. Jewelry not allowed. Sleeves should not be folded.”

Atri and Mandal, the men who police say forced millions to retake the constable exam, were both arrested in the case. Atri now sits in jail, awaiting trial. His lawyers have argued that he was falsely implicated. Mandal was later granted bail. Atri’s father, Gorakh Singh, described him as hardworking, saying he would stay up all night poring over books during his student days. “He may be a wrongdoer to the police,” his father said, “but not to us.”

He said his son’s legal expenses had put the family back by 10 to 15 years. If his son is, indeed, in the wrong, he said, he would prefer that the government finish him off in an “encounter”  an extrajudicial police killing. “We will weep for 10 days and then will go on with our day-to-day activities,” he said. “Our harassment will be over.”