Karnataka High Court grants bail to IPS officer arrested in police recruitment scam

The IPS officer is the first of more than 15 policemen arrested since April 2022 for the recruitment scam to be granted bail.

The CID unit of the Karnataka Police arrested the additional director general of police, Amrit Paul, 56, on July 4, 2022, for allegedly facilitating a scam in the police sub-inspectors recruitment exam conducted in October 2021 to select 545 police sub-inspectors from a fray of 54,287 candidates. The ADGP is charged with corruption, cheating and criminal conspiracy.

The CID filed a chargesheet against Paul last year and was awaiting a central government sanction to prosecute the IPS officer under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.

The CID recently received a prosecution sanction from the Union government, which is the appointing authority for Indian Police Service officers and sanctioning authority for prosecution under the PC Act.
The CID had earlier received a sanction from the Karnataka government – the competent authority – to prosecute the IPS officer.

The Additional Director General of Police rank officer has been accused of involvement in a scam in the recruitment of sub-inspectors which took place at the end of 2021 and surfaced in the public domain in 2022.

A sessions court earlier rejected the bail plea of the IPS officer, and the incarcerated officer approached the high court for bail on the grounds that he had been illegally detained over the last year. The high court reserved its orders on the plea on July 28, 2023.

The new Congress government in Karnataka has incidentally issued an order for a probe by a judicial commission headed by retired Karnataka High Court judge B Veerappa into the PSI recruitment scam that occurred during the tenure of the previous BJP government.

As many as 30 candidates in Bengaluru are alleged to have paid between Rs 30 lakh to Rs 85 lakh to middlemen to be selected as police sub-inspectors by rigging their answer sheets in a written exam at the police recruitment cell.

Based on a statement given by a former deputy superintendent of police in the recruitment cell, Shantakumar, the CID has alleged that Amrit Paul, who headed the police recruitment cell, received kickbacks from the DSP for facilitating the scam.

The recruitment scam occurred when the IPS officer of the rank of Additional Director General of Police headed the police recruitment cell from 2019–2022.

“It is a case of recruitment scam by manipulating the OMR sheets to deprive the deserving candidates who have honestly worked hard for the examination for selection. Therefore, it is a socio-economic offence which affects the moral fiber of the society,” a sessions court said in August last year while denying bail to the IPS officer.

“It is alleged that accused No.31 Shantha Kumar who was working as Deputy Superintendent of Police in recruitment department has disclosed that this petitioner being the custodian of the almirah in which kit boxes containing the OMR answer sheets, handed over the keys of the almirah to accused No.31 to tamper the OMR answer sheets,” a sessions court noted last year.

Advocates for the IPS officer have argued that the police official had not personally tampered with the OMR answer sheets of candidates and that he had no connection to the middlemen in the case.

The CID probe has found that staff at the recruitment cell accessed OMR answer scripts stored in a strong room in the cellar of the recruitment cell in the early hours of the day when no other staff was present in the cell or adjoining buildings.

They allegedly turned off the CCTV cameras and gained access to the strong room, where they removed answer scripts of candidates who had paid a network of operators between Rs 30 lakh to Rs 85 lakh to score high marks.

The primarily blank OMR sheets of candidates who had paid bribes were filled up by the recruitment staff and their associates over several days in the early morning hours before other staff arrived for duty. The answer scripts were supposed to be under the custody of the ADGP – the head of the cell.

The exam scam surfaced after it was found that one of the selected candidates, Veeresh H, who obtained 121 marks in the exam, had only answered questions for 31.5 marks (out of a total of 150 marks in the objective section). The Karnataka government annulled the exam results on April 29, 2022, after the CID reported large-scale rigging of the results.

As many as nine of the candidates who emerged in the top 10 list of rank winners for the PSI exam – when results were announced for the selection of 545 candidates in January 2022- were arrested by the CID for gaining selection illegally by bribing officials of the police recruitment cell.