IAS AND OTHER RANK HOLDERS FROM ‘CHEAT’ COP’S ALMA MATER UNDER SCANNER
La Excellence, a Hyderabadbased civil services coaching institute, whose tagline is “Civil Services never been an unconquerable frontier again”, is under the joint investigation of the Tamil Nadu and Telangana police in the wake of the arrest of an IPS officer, Safeer Karim, who was caught cheating while sitting for the UPSC examination to become an IAS officer, in Chennai, on 28 October.
Karim and his wife Joicy Joyce were long-time students and associates of La Excellence IAS academy and its founder-director Dr Rambabu Paladugu. La Excellence claims to have produced 12 IAS, IPS officers, including 200 other officers belonging to the Allied Services, in the last three years.
A Telangana police officer, who is coordinating with the UPSC and the Chennai police in the investigation, told this newspaper that they would probe if La Excellence had adopted any malpractices to get good ranks for its candidates from previous batches too. La Excellence claimed 12 ranks in 2015, 31 ranks in 2016 and 32 ranks in 2017.
The hi-tech copying incident by Karim, 29, has not only woken up the UPSC to newer possibilities of malpractice, but has also made it wary of the role being played by coaching institutes that are promising guaranteed ranks to those who undertake their crash courses. The UPSC has also sought the views of the police to tighten the frisking process of the candidates.
The arrest of Karim, who used the latest gadgets and Google Drive to send questions from a Chennai examination centre to the coaching institute in Hyderabad, and received the answers through a micro-earphone, has stunned the UPSC.
La Excellence, one of the top IAS coaching centres in Hyderabad’s Ashok Nagar, where dozens of civil services institutes are located, has branches in Delhi, Bhopal, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. Since its inception in 2012, La Excellence has claimed to have produced around 200 top rankers in UPSC examinations, and claims to have the highest success rate among all the other coaching centres in the city.
Safeer Karim, Joicy Joyce and Rambabu Paladugu were taken into custody on 30 October and were produced at a city criminal court the next day. They were taken to Chennai for further interrogation. Joicy is a faculty at La Excellence and the director of its Thiruvananthapuram branch, Karim La Excellence IAS, which was opened two years ago.
A joint team of police personnel from Chennai and Hyderabad recovered the laptop, camera, microphone, mobile phones and the Google Drive account where Karim used to send images of the question paper from a button camera fixed to his shirt. Joicy and Rambabu admitted to have sent answers to Karim from their office at the time of the examination.
Karim had a mini-Bluetooth in his ear, a micro-camera on his shirt and a mobile inside his trousers’ pockets. He sent the entire question paper to his Google Drive, which was picked up by Joicy and Rambabu in Hyderabad. The answers were read out to him on phone. The invigilators in the examination hall noticed that he was murmuring, and complained to the police, who swung into action within 30 minutes.
A senior police official heading the probe told The Sunday Guardian that the Chennai police took Karim out of the examination hall immediately and recovered all the gadgets on his body. But they kept his arrest secret so that his accomplices in Hyderabad did not get wind of it.
During his confession, Karim told the police that he had resorted to the same method in his civil services preliminaries too. A fivehour interrogation by Chennai police’s IT wing revealed that he had procured the gadgets through the Darknet a year ago. He allegedly tested them on his sister, who cracked an ISRO examination last year.