Telangana Public Service Commission paper leak: Staffers, police constable among 9 arrested

The police also seized from them four pen drives, seven mobile phones, three laptops, an iPad and a desktop computer.

He said the main accused, Pulidindi Praveen Kumar, 32, has been working as an assistant section officer in the TSPSC since 2017, and Atla Rajasekhar Reddy, 35, has been working as a network expert since November 2017 on an outsourcing basis as part of the team provide by Telangana State Technology Services.

A few days ago, a government Hindi teacher Renuka and her husband, Lavdyavath Dakhya, from Mahaboobnagar, approached Praveen and allegedly offered Rs 10 lakh in return for leaking the question papers. Praveen roped in Rajasekhar and stole the data from TSPSC, transferred it to a pen drive, took prints of question papers for the post of assistant engineer (civil), and shared the general studies paper on March 2, the police found.

Before this, Renuka’s brother Rajeshwar Nayak had started scouting for prospective buyers of question papers and contacted Medchal police constable Kethavath Srinivas who was preparing for recruitment exams. While he showed no interest as he was preparing for police recruitment for the post of sub-inspector, he directed Rajeshwar to Nilesh Nayak and Gopal Nayak, who were preparing for the AE (civil) exam. The accused took Rs 13.5 lakh from them with an assurance of providing the question paper.

The police found that Dhakya and Rajeshwar gave the question paper to Nilesh and Gopal, confined them to their homes, and escorted them to the examination centre on March 5. Around 25,000 aspirants took this exam on the day.

The police also arrested Nilesh’s brother Rajender Nayak, who allegedly arranged the money for his brother to buy leaked question papers.

The police booked all the nine accused under sections 409, 420, 120 (B) of the Indian Penal Code and Sec 66 (b) (c) & 70 of the IT Act and section 8 of the Prevention of Examinations Malpractices Act.