Army court martials 11 jawans for leaking engineers diploma entrance examination question papers

A havildar of the Bombay Engineers Group and Centre, Khadki, near Pune in Maharashtra, has been sentenced to 13 months rigorous imprisonment and dismissed from service by a District Court Martial which concluded on May 30. Besides, the accused was also sentenced to be reduced to the ranks.

In another trial in the same case, a Summary Court Martial had sentenced a jawan to rigorous imprisonment of 89 days, dismissal from service and reduction to the ranks. However, upon confirmation of the sentence, it was reduced to one month’s imprisonment.

While nearly a dozen jawans are facing disciplinary action for the leakage of the diploma entrance exam question paper and undergoing court martials, no officer handling the questioning papers is learnt to have suffered a similar fate.

The havildar whose trial concluded on May 30 is facing three charges under Section 63 of the Army Act (an act prejudicial to good order and military discipline).

The charges against him read that he at Khadki, between August 20, 2021, and September 10, 2021, improperly facilitated a havildar or storekeeper of Bombay Engineers Group & Centre, Khadki, Pune to obtain Rs 3,00,000 from another havildar, Rs 2,50,000 from a Naik and Rs 2,20,000 from another Naik for providing questions papers of Diploma Course Second Batch 2021 Entrance Examination.

According to the arguments put forth in defence of the accused, mobile phones confiscated from the individuals, including the accused, were not produced at the court martial or in the Court of Inquiry and Summary of Evidence.

The defence counsel argued that the officers involved in the investigation deposed in the court martial that they carried out initial investigation and had seen large financial transactions in the mobile phones of accused havildar and other individuals. However, neither any extract of the mobile phones nor its call data records in any form, in support of the charge, was reportedly produced before the court martial.

According to the defence counsel of the accused, an Independent Member, Sub Sanjay Bandre, has been shown to be present in the Summary of Evidence on September 14, 2022, even though he was on casual leave for one month from end of August to the end of September 2022. It was alleged by the defence counsel that the Subedar’s signature was falsely appended on the Summary of Evidence dated September 14.

The counsel has also questioned the opaqueness of certain facts in the court martial such as who was conducting the examination, which authority was regulating it, where all the exam centres were allocated, what was the source of the paper, who all were custodian of exam papers, how the questions were prepared, who all were responsible for the framing of the questions papers, how was the distribution methods of question papers defined and as such exam was actually scheduled or not and which authority was responsible for the execution of the schedule of the examination.

On the other hand, the prosecution counsel in the court martial has relied upon the banking transactions of the accused and found large sums of money being deposited in the relevant period which were attempted to be justified by the accused as ‘loans’. However, the prosecution proved that these sums of money had been transferred as payment for procuring the diploma entrance exam paper.

The jawan who had been sentenced to 89 days’ rigorous imprisonment later claimed that he had been forced to plead guilty in the Summary Court Martial under extreme pressure and that the entire proceedings were over in 10-15 minutes. He also alleged that in the Court of Inquiry and the Summary of Evidence, his signatures were taken by force and under threat of losing his job, denial of leave and imprisonment.