BHOPAL: Over 8,000 people skilled in typing and shorthand are under the Madhya Pradesh Police scanner for getting their qualifying certificate via unfair means three years ago.
The police’s special task force (STF) probing the 2013 fraud has written to the Directorate of Public Instructions (DPI) asking it to re-evaluate answer sheets of 8,000-plus candidates of the 11,000-odds who cleared the test.
Investigations into the multi-crore fraud pointed to a nexus of officials, private typing institutes and middlemen. Many of these candidates could be employed in government and private jobs. The STF will arrest over 400 candidates who passed the 2013 qualifying test with the aid of a officio-typing institute nexus and are working as typists/stenographers in state government departments, including courts and police department.
“We’ve arrested 30 candidates. We’ve prepared a list of over 400 candidates who paid `3,000 to `80,000 to the officio-typing institutes nexus for clearing the 2013 qualifying test,” said an STF official.
Money paid by around 3,000 candidates to the officio-typing institutes nexus could be around `3-5 crore, and will be much higher for all the 8,000-plus candidates. The lid was blown of the massive fraud following a complaint by a local journalist about six to 10 candidates in 2013.
Investigations unearthed the racket, which included top officials of the DPI’s typing and shorthand exam board, including its then head Subhash Pachpore and secretary Asha Jadaun. They have been chargesheeted and have been suspended.
Vijay Lodhi and Sanjay Awasthi, clerks at DPI, were the nucleus of the racket, linking over 250 private typing institutes in the state with the top brass of DPI. The alleged cheating candidates at centres across MP either wrote a few lines or left their answer sheets blank.
When the sheets reached DPI, they were sent to the beneficiary private typing institutes who got them completed by their students and sent them to DPI.