GUWAHATI: The cash-for-job scam in the Assam Public Service Commission (APSC) has blown the lid off an unholy system that was meticulously designed by insiders and outsiders to rig examinations for selecting state civil and police services officers.
There was a parallel system at work and the strings were pulled from the highest level in the organization set up under Constitutional provisions and investigators are now trying to put pieces together to find out how this system had worked.
The system would have continued to be in operation but for a young female dentist who blew the whistle when she was offered a government job by an 'outsider' for a bribe of Rs 10 lakh last year. Police nabbed the 'outsider', an engineer by profession, who was allegedly collecting the bribes on behalf of the 'insiders' in the commission. What followed was a series of arrests, including the commission's chairman Rakesh Paul, members Samedur Rahman and Basanta Doley, assistant controller of examinations Pabitra Kaibarta, commission staff Syed Mosraf Hussain and Abbas Ali Ahmed.
"Generally marks could have been manipulated at the interview stage but to reach this level, one had to pass the written examination stages to reach the interview stage. Investigations have revealed that manipulations took place at the mains examination," a source working closely with the investigators said.
Answer sheets were re-written with more accurate answers long after the examinations was over. In some cases, investigators have found that answer sheets of meritorious candidates were torn off and pinned to the answer booklet of others.
"We had the complaints and the accused but how do we make our case strong enough to stand in the court of law? We needed scientific evidence to prove that the whole exam was rigged to favour some candidates. We scrutinized answer scripts of the selected candidates and it was all clear. There was a mismatch in handwritings in some of the answer scripts. We also found that in some cases, the signatures of the invigilators did not match," the source said.
The police picked up answer scripts of 25 candidates having anomalies in handwriting. They then took handwriting samples of these candidates and sent them to forensic laboratories and the mismatch was proved. Someone else had written the examinations for these candidates.
There was a parallel system at work and the strings were pulled from the highest level in the organization set up under Constitutional provisions and investigators are now trying to put pieces together to find out how this system had worked.
The system would have continued to be in operation but for a young female dentist who blew the whistle when she was offered a government job by an 'outsider' for a bribe of Rs 10 lakh last year. Police nabbed the 'outsider', an engineer by profession, who was allegedly collecting the bribes on behalf of the 'insiders' in the commission. What followed was a series of arrests, including the commission's chairman Rakesh Paul, members Samedur Rahman and Basanta Doley, assistant controller of examinations Pabitra Kaibarta, commission staff Syed Mosraf Hussain and Abbas Ali Ahmed.
"Generally marks could have been manipulated at the interview stage but to reach this level, one had to pass the written examination stages to reach the interview stage. Investigations have revealed that manipulations took place at the mains examination," a source working closely with the investigators said.
Answer sheets were re-written with more accurate answers long after the examinations was over. In some cases, investigators have found that answer sheets of meritorious candidates were torn off and pinned to the answer booklet of others.
"We had the complaints and the accused but how do we make our case strong enough to stand in the court of law? We needed scientific evidence to prove that the whole exam was rigged to favour some candidates. We scrutinized answer scripts of the selected candidates and it was all clear. There was a mismatch in handwritings in some of the answer scripts. We also found that in some cases, the signatures of the invigilators did not match," the source said.
The police picked up answer scripts of 25 candidates having anomalies in handwriting. They then took handwriting samples of these candidates and sent them to forensic laboratories and the mismatch was proved. Someone else had written the examinations for these candidates.
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