Sify employees among 17 booked for SSC paper leak
Agency sleuths search 12 locations, including 4 offices of IT firm
The CBI on Wednesday registered an FIR against 17 persons, including 10 employees of Sify Technologies Pvt Ltd, in connection with the leak of paper for the combined graduate level examination ( CGLE) of Staff Selection Commission ( SSC).
The agency sleuths carried out searches at 12 locations, including four offices of the Sify Technologies Pvt Ltd in Chennai, Noida, Mumbai and Okhla ( New Delhi) besides the residence of one of its employees, Sant Prasad Gupta in Sheikh Sarai area in the national capital, sources said. The search operation of the agency also covered seven examination labs in Patna, Shimla, Ambala and Jaipur and three places in Delhi. In the CGLE- 2017, more than 30 lakh candidates across the country had applied for just over 8,000 vacancies.
It is alleged that the paper of the second tier of the Combined Graduate Level ( CGL), 2017, which took place on February 21, 2018 and its answer key were allegedly leaked and became viral on social media before examination began. The agency has also named seven students in the FIR who had appeared in the examination on the basis of the screenshot of the question paper which was allegedly leaked and became viral on social media. The examination papers were set in such a way that an examinee got the questions in a certain ‘ sequence’, sources alleged. The CBI managed to locate seven students who would have received those questions in that particular pattern.
“These students have been named as accused and their complicity would be decided during the course of investigation which has begun now”, sources said. Sant Prasad Gupta, custodian of the question bank at Sify, along with nine other employees of the company who were site managers at seven examination centres where the leaked paper had reached, have also been named in the FIR, sources said. The contract for conducting on- line CGL examination for recruitment of the Group B and C services in the central government was given to the Sify Technologies on April 12, 2016. Prior to that, the examination was conducted in optical marks reader ( OMR) mode, the FIR said.
During the enquiry, it surfaced that the Sify was entrusted with various duties to conduct examination which included identification and preparation of test centres across the country, preparation of question paper sets, sanitising each computer and the lab used in the examination to prevent any communication from the computers used by examinees, it said.