12 arrested in Nanded police recruitment racket

AURANGABAD: The Nanded police have busted a racket during the ongoing recruitment for 69 posts of constables and arrested 12 people, including nine candidates, a policeman and two men working for a Pune-based private company.
For the past four years, the private company, SSG Softwares, has been assisting the Nanded police with its recruitment process by scanning the answersheets using optical mark recognition (OMR).The company, which was earlier based in Sangli, helped with the recruitment process carried out this year by five groups of the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF), apart from the Nanded police.
Using contacts within the private company, the candidates and the policeman managed to fudge the scores of the written exams. The malpractice came to the fore after the answersheets of candidates who scored over 90% marks were checked again.
The Nanded police have registered a case under sections 420 (cheating and dishonesty), 465 (forgery), 471 (using as genuine a forged document), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC at the Wazirabad police station.
Nanded superintendent of police Chandrakishore Mina told TOI, "During the preliminary probe, we found that two constables attached to the Indian Reserve Batallion, Aurangabad, and the SRPF, Jalna, acted as middlemen and charged Rs 7.5 lakh per candidate to help them score abov 90% in the written exam."
Cop would approach candidates where recruitment was held
The police identified the IRB constable as Namdev Dhakne and the two employees of the private company as Shirish Avdhoot and Swapnil Solunke.Soon after the physical fitness tests, the written exams were held in March and April. Following a set process, the entire exam proceedings were recorded and the answersheets handed over to the company for scanning the scores and submitting the list.
Mina said that on receiving the scores, the police decided to manually cross-check the answersheets. “We found that 13 candidates had surprisingly scored over 90 marks out of 100. On checking their academic records, we found them to be average students. We then went through the question papers as well as the answersheets that we had retained and found that these candidates had neither done any rough work nor any calculations. Solving the paper without this is highly impossible even for intelligent candidates,” he said.
During the probe, the police team found that Dhakne would visit places and approach candidates where the recruitment was being held. He would collect Rs 7.5 lakh from each candidate and hand over the money to his accomplice in the Jalna SRPF. This accomplice would pay part of the money to the private company. He had handed over Rs 25 lakh as advance to the company for fudging the scores of the 13 candidates.