More than 100 persons arraigned by the CBI in connection with the Vyapam scam cases have been convicted so far.
Among the latest convicted persons are a candidate in the Madhya Pradesh Police Constable Recruitment Test-2013, Om Prakash Tyagi, and a middleman named Satish Jatav. The CBI had taken over the probe from the State police in August 2015. The agency alleged that Mr. Tyagi had engaged a person to appear in the test in his place.
In another Vyapam case, the CBI recently filed a supplementary chargesheet against 73 of them with respect to a pre-medical test conducted in 2012. While 54 of them have been accused of manipulating digital data and the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) answer sheets, 19 face the allegation of impersonation.
The 19 accused candidates had deliberately left ovals of 120 to 130 questions blank in their OMR answer sheets following which the digital data of the answer sheets was manipulated by the accused Vyapam officials to assign them marks, ensuring that those candidates were selected.
In several cases, intelligent students from outside Madhya Pradesh were allegedly engaged to appear in the test. The CBI found that 16 alleged impersonators were from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.
Real identities of impersonators
The real identities of such impersonators were established by examining the data of those who appeared in pre-test tests from 2010 to 2014; details of bank accounts and credit/debit cards used to pay the examination fee; social media profiles created using phone numbers and email addresses mentioned in the application/counselling forms; and photographs of over 18 lakh pre-medical test aspirants and medical students/practitioners.
“The then Principal System Analyst of Vyapam, Bhopal, had prepared an excel sheet containing names of the accused candidates, their sponsors, the roll numbers, amounts paid or to be paid, marks and category, which was recovered by the probe team,” said an agency official.
The CBI had earlier filed a chargesheet against 592 accused persons in November 2017 in the same case.