Bihar college principal, lecturers among 4 arrested for BPSC paper leak: Top cop | Latest News India
PATNA: A college principal and two lecturers who were expected to conduct the Bihar Public Service Commission examination at Ara district’s Veer Kunwar Singh College have been arrested in connection with the paper leak of the BPSC 67th Prelims Exam conducted and cancelled on Sunday. The block development officer (BDO), Jai Vardhan Gupta, who was assigned as a magistrate to oversee the examinations in the area, has also been arrested by the Economic Offences Unit (EOU) of the Bihar Police.
“We have arrested four including Barhara BDO (Bhojpur district) in the paper leak case,” said Nayyar Hasnain Khan, the additional director general of police who heads EOU, said.
The other three to be arrested have been identified by the EOU are Dr Yogendra Singh, principal-cum-centre superintendent of Veer Kunwar Singh College Ara (VKSC), Sushil Kumar Singh, lecturer-cum-controller and Agam Kumar Sahay, lecturer-cum-assistant centre superintendent of VKSC.
The SIT, which was entrusted with the probe, registered the first information report (FIR) late on Monday evening and formally started its probe. The Barhara BDO was the first to be detained by the special investigation team set up by the EOU on Tuesday morning. He was picked up from his residence and brought to Patna.
The college, which EOU officials said was the epicentre of the paper leak, is linked to a contractor Surendra Singh who comes from a political family and was earlier accused in the fake stamp paper case.
Surendra Singh, husband of a former Janata Dal (United) legislator from Barhara constituency, denied that the college had anything to do with the paper leak.
He told HT on phone that his family donated 5 acre land to set up the college in 1978 and was affiliated with the Veer Kunwar Singh University. But in 2017 the college’s affiliation was cancelled.
Singh insisted that the leak did not happen from the college, saying it had come into the limelight because of a delay in distributing the question paper. “Because of this, many of the 900 aspirants who appeared for the paper from the college created a ruckus”.
Investigators, who visited Ara’s VKSC, however, were not as convinced. One officer said they also came across complaints from aspirants that a select group of students were seated in a separate room and given the question papers 15 minutes before the examination was due to start at 12 noon. An official said this may not be linked to the leak but if true, it indicated that the system devised by BPSC to ensure fairness did not always work at the ground level.
In its initial probe, SIT found that the BPSC examination controller who received one set of the leaked paper at 11.43am on Sunday, 17 minutes before the exam was to begin at over 1,000 centres in the state’s 38 districts.
The SIT members also spoke to the individual who forwarded the 22-page question paper to the exam controller. This person, an official said, had received the question paper at 11.33 am. It is not clear who sent him the leaked paper. But an official underlined that WhatsApp tagged the document on his phone as one which had been “forwarded many times”.
The initial probe indicates that all the versions of the leaked examination paper circulating on social media appeared to have originated from a single point.
The FIR into the paper leak has been registered on the basis of the statement of deputy superintendent of police (DSP) Bhaskar Ranjan under sections 420 (cheating), 467(forgery), 468 (forgery for cheating) and 120b (conspiracy), in addition to provisions under the 66 Information Technology Act and the 3/10 Bihar Examination Control Act.
