Superintendent of Police Shankar Kengar, who is heading the SIT, said, “As per primary information, Parve is suspected to have appeared as a dummy for at least 15 candidates.
IN yet another startling development in the investigation into the statewide dummy candidate racket, a police officer has been arrested for acting as a ‘dummy’ — pretending to be the candidate — in several recruitment exams for government jobs. The arrested accused, Assistant Inspector Somnath Parve, is originally from Latur and is posted with Nagpur Police. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is probing the racket, had earlier arrested the alleged ringleader of the racket, Prabodh Rathod, a suspended government employee from Nanded who had appeared as a dummy for at least 10 candidates. The SIT had then arrested a Document Examiner of the CID and a police constable from the Economic Offences Wing of Nanded Police in connection with the racket. The SIT was formed in April after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis intervened in the matter.
Superintendent of Police Shankar Kengar, who is heading the SIT, said, “As per primary information, Parve is suspected to have appeared as a dummy for at least 15 candidates. He is part of the main group… and has been in close contact with Rathod since the beginning. He has been remanded to police custody for nine days.” A police officer said members of the racket used to decide which one of them would appear as the ‘dummy’ based on the looks, height and body type of the original candidate.
The SIT has been entrusted with the task of investigating 50 cases registered across Maharashtra, including 10 in Pune. As per the primary estimate by investigators, the number of cases in which dummy candidates are suspected to have appeared instead of the actual candidates — in the last two years — is over 400. Now, several recruitments in departments such as Police, Social Welfare, Government Secretariat, Agriculture and Women and Child Development are under the SIT’s scanner.
The racket had been revealed when Yogesh Jadhav, a 27-year-old political science graduate, had unearthed several cases of impersonation by filing Right to Information (RTI) applications, which led to a statewide probe by the CID SIT. Jadhav had started digging into the cases after he found that several youths had sold or mortgaged their ancestral property to pay a middleman, in order to get selected for a government job.
