In Wake Of TRB & TNPSC Rackets, TOI Reconstructs The Modus Operandi Of Private Agencies That Rigged TN Recruitment Exams

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office can take credit for blowing the lid off an unprecedented recruitment scam in Tamil Nadu. It took just a nudge from the PMO, based on an innocuous letter by a job-aspirant, to expose how several thousand high-paying government jobs had been sold by scamsters handling recruitment on behalf of the TN government for years.

It will need either the CBI or a special investigation team under the direct supervision of Madras high court to bring all culprits, including IAS officers who had stints in Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) and Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) to book.

Officers, sleuths and judges are stunned by the ease with which the scamsters managed to rig the recruitment protocol for government jobs, including the state’s top civil service — Group -I — and push candidates who had paid ?25 lakh to ?35 lakh each.

For long, TNPSC and TRB have outsourced the selection process, compromising on the very sanctity of selection procedures. Just three private companies now conduct recruitments for almost every government job in the statefrom that of village administrative officer (VAO) to Group-I services. The other services include National Eligibility Test (NET) and State Level Eligibility Test (SLET) which are a must for college lecturers, Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) which is mandatory for school teachers, BT/PG assistant recruitment for schools and all Group-I to IV services under TNPSC.

At present, the ‘recruitment’ of 270 to 280 assistant lecturers for polytechnics and more than 70 ‘appointments’ made to Group-I services which include DSPs and deputy collectors have been put on hold, thanks to the timely intervention of the Madras high court. Prodded by the court, half a dozen people have been arrested. Some key suspects have gone underground with family.

Piecing together documents and interviews with people privy to the investigation, TOI has reconstructed the scam. The following is the criminal modus operandi, perfected by scamsters over the years.

TNPSC and TRB have been giving ‘recruitment contracts’ renewable every year to private agencies, so much so that it is this private company, not TNPSC, which places orders with a Hyderabad-based ‘security press’ for coding sheets. While placing orders, the company asks the press to supply specimen copies of coding sheets, but without printing the word ‘specimen’ across the pages. Though specimen coding sheets are meant for demo purposes, these companies illegally coded the specimen sheets at their scanning centres.

A gang of brokers, some already arrested, and employees of different departments, fanned out scouting for candidates with paying capacity. Once a deal was struck, the candidate was given his ‘registration’ number well ahead of the examination, and crucial instructions such as use of a specific kind of pencil to mark the coding sheets. Of course, allotment of registration numbers, dummy numbers and matching these two with photographs of candidates were all responsibilities of these agencies. Within a day or two after the examination, the outsource agencies marked the specimen sheets with appropriate answers and scanned them.

As per procedure, TNPSC and TRB secure hard copies of all answer sheets in their strong rooms and ask the agencies to scan all coded OMR sheets under 24X7 CCTV surveillance. Scamsters gave original marksheets and cloned scan records to TNPSC and TRB authorities, but took soft copies of the scanned sheets.

The actual tampering of scores took place while compiling marks. In the case of ‘payment category’ candidates, the tampered marks were entered and scanned images of fraudulent answer sheets inserted as files.

The scam was working quite well, till a failed candidate (name withheld) noticed that many of his peers who flunked in several competitive examinations, just as he did repeatedly for several years, were selected as assistant lecturers in the TRB examination. He gave details of 19 candidates, and wrote a letter to the PMO, which forwarded it to TRB for action.

It did not take much time for a diligent woman officer to compare the scores of the 19 ‘selected candidates’ with their original answer sheets and the cloned scan copies of their code sheets in possession of TRB, to realise that a fraud had been committed. As the issue was being debated in courts, police stations and in the media, the official chose to hold up the result and publish online the entire list of more than 1 lakh code sheets of candidates, with a suggestion that candidates compare their marks and bring any anomaly to officials’ notice.

Two things stunned the TRB top brass: One, the number of fraudulently selected candidates was not 19, but between 270 and 280. Two, scamsters had not just jacked up marks of their candidates, they had also ‘reduced’ the marks of some deserving candidates to make it doubly sure that those who paid them got through.

Only five people have so far been arrested in connection with the scam, but police are closing in on a Tangedco supervisor who had apparently made a couple of hundreds of crores of rupees through such deals. He is seen as the mastermind and a crucial link. He, along with his family, is absconding.

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