About a week before the NEET ‘paper leak’ controversy erupted, the Delhi Police was scouting a hotel in South Delhi’s Mahipalpur — they were probing another kind of ‘NEET-linked’ scam.

On May 2, sources said, Crime Branch officers in the national capital got a from the Additional Commissioner of Police in Surat about a man named Vinod Bhai Bika Bhai Patel.

Patel, a broker in Surat, had been claiming in Gujarat that he could get students admitted to top-tier medical institutions through NEET. And he and his three friends were staying in the Mahipalpur hotel.

With the nation-wide medical entrance exam just a day away, a police team swiftly brought the men in for questioning.

This is what Patel told them.…