The mother of a 26-year-old girl rushed home from her school duties as soon as news of the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) paper leak was splashed in the media. Anxiety written all over her face, the teacher in a government school dreaded that her sensitive daughter might resort to the extreme step out of disappointment or distraught over her two-year preparation going waste.
After reaching home, she panicked when the door was not opened despite several calls but heaved a sigh of relief when her daughter, with tears in her eyes, welcomed her. At least, she was safe!
A young school teacher testing her luck with the Group-I examination after taking leave for two months for preparation joined back with anger and anguish clearly visible. “I didn’t expect such an outcome for my three years of effort and two months of leave from the school,” the crestfallen teacher told her colleagues.
In the Osmania University landscape garden, which had turned into nature’s coaching centre, hundreds of students who have been thronging the place for preparation are seething with anger. Most of them have crossed their prime years of student life and are convinced that this was the last opportunity for them to take a crack at Group-I and other competitive exams. After all, most of these notifications were issued after a long wait of eight years since the formation of Telangana.
Similar sentiment prevails at the City Central Library in Chikkadpally, another hub of job aspirants. After years of wait and toil that consumed their precious youth and tonnes of money, these energy-sapped aspirants are not just angry but seem to have lost hope in the system. How can two or three persons take an entire State for a ride and shatter the dreams of lakhs of parents and students, and the system just shut its eyes without noticing the fraud.
When confidence goes for a toss everything is lost, says Ramesh Naik (name changed), who has applied for three examinations including Group-I. He didn’t qualify in Group-I prelims but strongly feels it was due to the paper leak. He and his friends sitting under the huge Ashoka tree in the OU Landscape Garden are disheartened. “What is the guarantee that all the exams conducted so far were free from fraud and also the future exams would be fair,” they say in unison. “Now, we don’t even trust our own friends and relatives who cleared the competitive tests and secured jobs.”
After the leakage scandal broke out and the government found that it was an insider’s job, who have fallen to the vices, this was bound to be the reaction. Some call it a honeytrap given the involvement of a Gurukul School teacher Renuka, who apparently enticed the TSPSC employee Pulidindi Praveen Kumar to sell the papers. He, in turn, used the services of the network incharge Rajshekhar Reddy to hack the systems in the confidential section and steal the papers. Others call it greed for money and unacceptable lacunae in the system. As the investigation is on, more skeletons are tumbling out with the role of many more accomplices in the chain surfacing.
After an uproar over the leakage, the TSPSC announced the cancellation of the Assistant Engineers (AE) exam conducted on March 5 apart from the Group-I preliminary exam, Divisional Accounts Officer (DAO) and Assistant Executive Engineers (AEE) exams. The TSPSC also announced that Group-I preliminary examination will be re-conducted on June 11 and the dates for the other exams will be announced later. The Group-I examination was conducted on October 16, 2022; the AEE examination on January 22, and the DAO examination on February 26 this year.
The fraud came to light when the police received a call on its emergency number 100 about some fraud in Assistant Engineers (AE) recruitment test held on March 5, 2023. The TSPSC was immediately alerted, and the Commission in its enquiry realised that the computer systems where the question papers were stored were found to be tampered with.
The police swung into action and arrested TSPSC Assistant Section Officer, Praveen and later an outsourced employee and network incharge Atla Rajshekhar Reddy along with seven others who were involved in the AE paper leakage including Renuka, a teacher in Social Welfare Gurukul school and Srinivas, a police constable at Medchal police station. Initial investigation revealed that the two TSPSC employees sold the paper to Renuka for ₹ 10 lakh and Renuka in turn along with her husband Dhakya sold it to two other aspirants Neelesh and Gopal.
With the media further exposing the seriousness of the fraud and reporting that the leak was not confined to just the AE exam, doubts were cast over other exams too forcing the government to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to dig deep into the case. As feared, the scourge was deep and it was found that Praveen and his colleagues had tampered with the systems and leakage was far more than initially feared. Forensic analysis of his pen drive led to some uncomfortable truths and about 15 question papers of various exams were found in it.
The media also exposed how the accused Praveen also secured 103 marks in Group-I though he was disqualified for a mistake in bubbling the Hall Ticket number wrong on the OMR sheet. Whether he did it deliberately to deflect attention from him and mislead people is also being investigated. However, police also found that about 20 employees of TSPSC appeared for the all-important Group-I exam and their complicity is being enquired into. Police stumbled upon the evidence that Suresh, who had earlier worked with the TSPSC received the Group-1 paper from the prime suspect Praveen Kumar and passed it on to at least 10 other employees of TSPSC.
All these 10 persons and Suresh had appeared in October last and qualified in the Group 1 prelims and started preparing for the main exam. Notices have been issued to them to appear before the SIT. Police believe that the number of beneficiaries could be higher with the paper passed on to outsiders as well. Further investigation will reveal how much money changed hands and what was the modus operandi.
As the clouds of suspicion continue over the TSPSC employees, the clean record of TSPSC Chairman B. Janardhan Reddy and TSPSC Secretary Anita Ramachandran in their careers gave some solace to the government that the system was not involved in the fraud but a few individuals had tarnished the government’s credibility. The Information Technology Minister K.T. Rama Rao, banking on the unquestionable integrity of the two key officials, declared that a few employees’ unpardonable deceit indeed brought some disgrace. In fact, he apologised to lakhs of candidates. Their callousness, however, overshadowed their functioning now.
As expected, the leakage took political overtones and gave enough ammunition to the Opposition parties when the government was grappling with the investigation into Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter and MLC Kavitha Kalvakuntla’s alleged involvement in the New Delhi Liquor policy. The Opposition parties – Congress and BJP apart from student organisations rattled the government with incessant protests.
In fact, Telangana Congress president A. Revanth Reddy led a delegation to the Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan seeking her sanction for the prosecution of the IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao using her powers under Article 163 of the Constitution. The BJP chief Bandi Sanjay too upped the ante by asking the Minister to take responsibility for the leak as it was his department’s duty to ensure fool-proof security to the IT wing of the TSPSC. The BJP has announced several programmes to pressurise the Minister to resign.
Former IPS officer and Bahujan Samaj Party chief in Telangana, R.S. Praveen Kumar alleged the Chief Minister’s family’s involvement in the leakage. Demanding an inquiry by a sitting High Court Judge or the CBI, he said he had the evidence and would furnish the details to them and not the government-constituted SIT as it would only hush up the case. Interestingly, Mr. Praveen Kumar is a former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer.
Opposition fears that SIT reports in Telangana have never injected confidence in the society and their very constitution is being looked at as an effort to hush up cases more than revealing the facts behind the unlawful incidents. Their argument gets credence from the way the reports of earlier SITs have never been put in the public domain or have resulted in courts delivering justice. They cite the SIT into gangster Nayeem’s killing or Aler encounter or the recent SIT into MLAs’ poaching case that have either made no headway or the reports suppressed.
The road ahead for the government looks rough but it can build confidence by taking stringent action against the accused and all those involved in the chain of this leak at the earliest. The ball is in the government’s court now.
