BHUBANESWAR: In a significant breakthrough, the Balasore police have stumbled upon an organised racket behind the question paper leak of JE (Mains) and CGL examinations conducted by the Odisha Staff Selection Commission (OSSC).
Sources said the nine accused - four each from Bihar and Odisha and one from Andhra Pradesh - are part of a professional group that was behind the OSSC question paper leak and subsequent exploitation of job aspirants.
Although initially, the accused had tried to hoodwink the cops by insisting they had supplied practice papers to the aspirants, the Balasore police team dug deeper and found more links after individually questioning the job aspirants.
When they cross-checked the statements of the accused with that of the aspirants, the versions were mismatched. Then the investigating team searched and came across half-burnt question papers which matched the original ones. This led to the cancellation of the examination.
Preliminary investigation revealed the OSSC question paper leak may have links with similar incidents in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi. The Bihar state commission had cancelled the first phase of the recruitment exam on December 26 last year following a report submitted by the Bihar Police’s economic offences unit on the question paper leak.
Sources said the racket used a modus operandi under which they kept track of the aspirants. The rackets are known to target a small group of aspirants so as not to raise alarm, carry out their operation smoothly and make a fortune out of it.
In the Balasore case, they had demanded Rs 18 lakh from each candidate and kept their important documents as a mortgage.“It is easy to make a huge amount of money if everything goes as planned. In this case, the plan was to hold on to the certificates of aspirants and let them take the examination which, however, was foiled by police,” said the sources.
With only a small set of candidates becoming the beneficiaries, the entire examination looks very normal and democratic while it becomes a win-win situation for the racket members as well as the aspirants, the sources said.
In the current case, police had tipped off on the possibility of unfair means in the examination and a team of Sahadevkhunta police intercepted the accused after they received information on the aspirants coming in a bus and two cars to a hotel on the Odisha-West Bengal border.
“The leakage may have happened at the printing press where the question papers were printed. Six more persons in connection with the case are being interrogated. We are at the fag end of the investigation,” said a police official.
Sources said such rackets keep track of all such examinations and the ones conducted by the staff selection commission of different states are their targets given the loopholes in the system and laxity on the part of the agencies entrusted with the job.