Another printing firm in Delhi under STF scanner
Delhi-based printing firm’s director Rai Anoop Prasad had sub let the work to another printing press.
LUCKNOW : A few more people, including the owner and employees of another printing firm of New Delhi, were under the scanner of the Special Task Force (STF) in connection with the UP Teachers’ Eligibility Test2021 (UPTET) question paper leak case, said police on Thursday.
Officials said Delhi-based printing firm’s director Rai Anoop Prasad, who managed to procure a work order worth ₹13 crore for printing over 22 lakh question papers, had sub let the work to another printing press. Prasad and secretary of Exam Regulatory Authority (ERA), UP, Sanjay Kumar Upadhyay, had already been arrested in the matter and now the STF was verifying the role of the second printing press, where the question papers were actually printed, they added.
A senior STF official said the involvement of people associated with the second printing press was suspected in selling some sets of question papers to different solvers’ groups in return of money.
He said the ERA secretary had given the printing job to Prasad’s RSM Finserv Ltd firm in violation of security norms laid for this purpose. As per the norms, the questions papers should be published at least 1000 km away from the examination centres and employees should not be aware about the language in which papers are printed. The official said the work was given to Prasad’s firm barely 40 km from Gautam Buddh Nagar, where many examination centres were set up.
Investigation revealed that the ERA secretary and Prasad were familiar with each other since the former’s posting in Gautam Buddh Nagar. It also came to fore that Upadhyay and Prasad met in a hotel just three days before the work order was released on November 26. The investigators had retrieved phone call details of both the accused as incriminating evidence about their links, said the STF official.
So far, 38 people had been arrested in connection with the paper leak case while the involvement of at least 10 others surfaced in the matter. The UP STF had arrested 33 people while five others were arrested by the local police unit in Basti district.
The state government had cancelled the UPTET-2021 on Sunday (November 28) after the paper leak came to fore following the arrests and recovery of question papers from some of them hours before the exam on Saturday night (November 27). A total of 19,99,418 examinees were supposed to write the UPTET scheduled in two shifts at 2,736 centers across 75 districts of UP on Sunday, but the exam was cancelled after the paper leak.