India, 1997 to 2026. Fifty exams whose paper got out, and three more the government says didn’t. Nobody keeps this list, so we made one.
From court judgments, police statements and published reporting, about how public bodies run public exams.
No individuals are named anywhere on this page. Cases are described by exam, body and outcome. Where someone was accused rather than convicted, it says so.
Something here wrong? akash@sheets.works, corrected within seven days. Accurate as of 28 July 2026.
These are the ones we could document.
Parliament asked how many exam papers had leaked. The education ministry said it does not keep that data. It said so in both houses.
So we counted them ourselves, out of newspapers and court records.
Now colour them by what happened to whoever did it.
click a category to see only those.
Five ended in a conviction. One of those is Vyapam, and it only moved because the Supreme Court took it off the state and handed it to the CBI. Another is a Punjab case that was recruitment corruption rather than a leaked paper.
Four were closed with nothing. Acquittals, closure reports, and one shut with a note saying the accused could not be traced.
Thirty-seven are still running. The oldest is an engineering paper from 1997, and as of the last report on it, in 2024, it was still hearing witnesses.
Four we simply could not find out about.
And in three, the authorities say nothing leaked.
Five convictions, out of fifty-three cases.
Twenty-nine years, five convictions. The two railway cases took twenty-three years and fourteen. In the second one, ten people were convicted and four were acquitted.
The exam was for 454 pharmacy officer posts on 19 July, sat by about seven thousand people. The chief minister says there was no paper leak, only cheating during the exam itself: pen cameras and wireless devices sending the questions out, earpieces relaying the answers back. The police said the same, that they found no leak and no official involved. An opposition MP released the FIR and pointed out that no scanner pen was seized, only Bluetooth devices and a headphone, which she says means the paper was out beforehand. The exam was not cancelled. The result has not been declared either.
Whether it ever gets counted depends on who wins that argument. Two other cases in this archive were closed the same way. Uttar Pradesh said its 2022 Lekhpal exam had not leaked and let it run. Bihar said the disruption at one Patna centre in December 2024 was candidates causing trouble, not a leak, and re-examined only that centre.
In June 2026 a parliamentary panel asked the National Testing Agency to supply a definition of a paper leak. It had to ask because there is not one.
sources: pti via theprint, times now, news18, the tribune, indian express, the week, scroll. the three cases are marked in the archive as disputed rather than counted as leaks.
The Indian Express went through 45 leaks, 2002 to 2025, each one sat by at least a lakh people. This is what happened to everyone the police picked up. One mark is one person.
Printing press staff, clerks, candidates and constables get arrested and charged. The people who run the examining bodies get transferred, or resign. No director-general of the national testing agency has faced criminal prosecution in any leak case.
In one state a press supervisor was named as the main accused in a fourteen-thousand-page chargesheet. Years later he was still in jail and still untried. The chairman of the board resigned and was never accused of anything.
sources: indian express, the wire, theprint, the tribune. individuals are not named here; the cases are in the archive.
Years from the leaked exam to a verdict, for the cases where the timeline is documented. The darker bars are still running.
Each one is a method investigators described in a specific case. The tools keep changing. The presses and the vans do not.
Police have named the same small group of men in case after case, across different states and different exams. One was linked to a 2015 medical entrance racket and arrested again over a 2024 leak, nine years apart. Another was dismissed from a government teaching job over twelve cases. A third has at least eleven against him.
None of them has been convicted of any of it. One has been acquitted in five cases. A seventh man was on this list for two years until the CBI said in July that it had found no evidence against him and had never charged him.
case counts are as reported by police and prosecutors to theprint and the indian express. individuals are not named here.
What investigators say a seat cost, case by case. Not adjusted for inflation, so 2011 and 2024 are not the same rupee.
About six crore people a year sit these exams, school boards included. On central government recruitment, a Lok Sabha answer put the success rate at three in a thousand. The dark bar is applicants. The green one is jobs.
sources: newslaundry, the hindu, the hindu / times of india / new indian express for the rajasthan sub-inspector figures, and a lok sabha written answer for the success rate. ratios are for the specific cancelled exams named.
At least a dozen states have one now, and so does the Centre. Every one of them punishes a leak after it has happened. None covers the route the paper actually takes: setting, printing, transport, scanning, marking. Rajasthan’s got assent in April 2022. A constable exam leaked the month after.
The minister was gone in seventy-two days. In the 2024 case, forty-five people were chargesheeted and the trial still has not started.
India does not publish a register of exam paper leaks. In 2024 the education ministry told both houses of Parliament that the data is not maintained. In June 2026 a parliamentary panel had to ask the National Testing Agency what a paper leak is.
So the 53 cases here were assembled by hand from reporting by the Indian Express, Newslaundry, ThePrint, The Wire, The Tribune and Scroll, alongside court judgments and police statements. Three of those newsrooms have each built their own count, using different thresholds: 45 major cases, 89 cases, and 220 incidents. They do not contradict each other. They are counting different things, because there is no agreed definition of the thing being counted.
This archive is certainly incomplete. Twenty-four of the fifty-three rows have not yet had a single outlet pinned to them by name, and each one says so when you open it. Where two sources disagree on a candidate count, both figures are kept rather than averaged. No party affiliation is attached to any case: leaks in this record happened under twelve different parties, and the argument here is about whether anyone ever gets prosecuted, not about who was in office.