A Haryana man who was caught cheating to successfully answer all questions in Malayalam, aided by possible question paper leak from Delhi, has blown the lid off a pan-India recruitment scam in the Department of Post.

The arrest has also bolstered the belief that 150 candidates from Haryana’s Hisar who topped a similar exam conducted by Tamil Nadu circle late last year, cracking questions in Tamil and English, had cheated.

On Sunday, the Kerala Postal Circle conducted an aptitude examination to recruit 583 postmen and 11 mail guards for the Railway Mail Service. The test, comprising 100 questions, was split into four sections: General Knowledge, Mathematics, English and Malayalam, with 25 marks for each section.

An invigilator at the centre in Kasargod called the police after seeing the candidate from Haryana successfully attempting all the questions in Malayalam.

According to a report in The New Indian Express, when the police reached the examination centre, they found that the person, 22-year-old Gulbant from Sonepat in Haryana, had the answers to all the 100 multiple-choice questions in his cellphone’s inbox.

Gulbant managed to sneak his phone into the exam hall evading checking, and “once inside, he messaged the code of his question paper to his accomplice, who inboxed him all the answers,” said Vidyanagar inspector Babu Peringath.

The question paper contains only multiple choice questions, and are answered in Optical Mark Recognition sheets which are then valued using a computer software. The exams are conducted in a centralized manner from Delhi, the local postal officials have little role other than reaching the question papers and collecting the mark sheets from the exam centres, said a source.

Kerala police found that Gulbant did not speak Malayalam and told the newspaper that they suspect the answers were sent to him by a person in Sonepat, Haryana.

The likelihood of a scam in the recruitment of postman and mail guard had prompted the postal department from publishing the final list of successful candidates from Tamil Nadu. A senior official of the department confirmed that the final list was withheld after the possible leak of the question paper, which gave undue advantage to candidates from Haryana, was brought to the notice by candidates from Tamil Nadu.

The postal department had in March 2017 published the results of the exams held on December 11, 2016 for 300 vacancies in 47 divisions in Tamil Nadu. More than 150 successful candidates were from Hisar in Haryana. They had scored higher marks in Tamil than locals who had also taken the same exam.

“We also took note of media reports and passed on our reservations to our superiors on the fairness of the exam” said a senior officer in the Tamil Nadu circle of the postal department. Though the results were published in March, the final list with place of posting was yet to be published due to the possibility of a scam, he said.

They had scored more than 80 marks out of 100 in the exams which consisted of four parts – Maths, English, General Knowledge and Tamil (25 marks for each subject). Many students from Maharashtra too had scored high marks in Tamil.

“When we saw the results we were surprised that the candidates from Haryana had uniformly scored high marks. After we managed to access their mark sheets from the website we were stunned to see that they got more marks in Tamil than candidates whose mother tongue was Tamil," said Saravanan, one of the candidates from Madurai.

" We were also surprised why they chose Tamil instead of Hindi for the local language.”

One of his friends, Madharaj, who had got the mobile numbers of some Haryana candidates from their mark sheets called them and spoke to them in Tamil.

“He got the uniform reply (in Hindi) that they did not Tamil. When he switched to English they said in Hindi that they did not know English as well,” said Saravanan.

“There are different sets of question papers, so either they have answer keys for all the sets of question papers or they get the keys on their mobile phones once they message the question paper’s code number to whoever is helping them,” said former examiner of the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission.

(With inputs from G C Shekhar in Tamil Nadu)

For in-depth, objective and more importantly balanced journalism, Click here to subscribe to Outlook Magazine