The Gujarat police have arrested six out of the 10 persons named in the First Information Report for their alleged involvement in leaking the question paper of an examination held recently in the State for the recruitment of government head clerks.
The written exam for the recruitment of 186 head clerks was held at different centres across the State on December 12 in which as many as 88,000 aspirants appeared for the test conducted by the Gujarat Subordinate Services Selection Board (GSSSB).
Former Ahmedabad Mayor and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Asit Vora is the Chairman of the GSSSB.
The FIR was lodged by the police after the State government initially dismissed allegations of the paper’s leak from a centre in north Gujarat.
“Of the 10 accused named in the FIR registered at Prantij police station of Sabarkantha district, six have been arrested,” Minister of State for Home Harsh Sanghavi told mediapersons in Gandhinagar on Friday.
Immediately after the exam began, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had claimed that the question paper was leaked prior to the exam, and the question and answer sheets were exchanged through WhatsApp.
“We had formed 24 teams after learning about the paper leak. While six persons involved in the crime have been arrested, the remaining four will also be nabbed soon. As a pre-planned conspiracy, they leaked the paper, solved it and then gave it to candidates before the exam,” Mr. Sanghavi said.
Mr. Sanghavi said no decision to cancel the exam held on December 12 had been taken by the State government yet.
The six accused arrested by the police have been identified as Dhruv Barot, Mahesh Patel, Chintan Patel, Kuldip Patel, Darshan Vyas and Suresh Patel, all residents of Sabarkantha district.
According to available details, the accused persons managed to acquire the question paper before the exam, after which they sold it to the candidates for nearly ₹15 lakh, and also helped them in solving the paper at various locations a day before the exam.
One Jayesh Patel had managed to get the question paper and gave it to those linked to him.
So far, the probe has revealed that 16 candidates, including Dhruv Barot, received the question paper from the accused a day before the exam.
According to the FIR, these 16 candidates were divided into three different groups and taken to three different locations near Prantij on December 11 to solve the question paper. On the day of the exam, the accused persons arranged transportation to drop these candidates to their respective exam centres.
The accused have been booked under IPC Sections 420 (cheating), 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy).
The leak has triggered a massive controversy in Gujarat with both the Congress and the AAP slamming the State government for large-scale cheating and leakage of papers in various State recruitment exams.
Earlier, the AAP’s Gujarat unit youth wing leader Yuvrajsinh Jadeja had on Monday alleged that the question paper was leaked prior to the exam. As proof, he shared a photograph from a notebook page having handwritten answers to some of the questions asked in the exam.
Gujarat Congress president Jagdish Thakor and other leaders demanded the sacking of Asit Vora and a State-wide probe in the exams conducted earlier.
“Since 2015, papers have been leaked in every recruitment test conducted by various agencies of Gujarat,” Mr. Thakor said. He added that, earlier, recruitment exams had to be cancelled after evidence of leaked papers came to light.
