Supriya Sule alleges PMC paper leak, seeks scrapping of exam; civic body chief denies it

In a social media post, Sule said, “The PMC has acknowledged that the paper for the junior engineer recruitment was received by only 3 students and has clearly concluded that a paper leak incident occurred. However, despite this, the PMC is not ready to cancel this recruitment process. Can the municipal corporation assure that this wrongdoing was limited to just these 3 individuals? A thorough investigation is necessary to clarify the nature of the paper leak case and its threads. But even before that, the Municipal Corporation is taking the selected candidates into service. As a result, the hard work of many other eligible and honest candidates has gone to waste. I request the Municipal Commissioner to cancel this flawed recruitment process and conduct the entire process afresh in a fully transparent manner.”

PMC had published an advertisement on January 9, 2024 for vacant posts of junior engineer (Civil). It published a revised advertisement on October 1, 2025, adding that posts for social and horizontal reservation were required. PMC received 41,272 applications.

The PMC then first scheduled the examination for December 1, 2025, which was deferred to January 25, 2026 after candidate delegations cited the municipal council elections. “A second round of representations demanded that the examination be held only at TCS iON centres, and the PMC accepted that demand and deferred the exam again,” the commissioner said.

IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) finally conducted the examination on April 22, 23 and 29, 2026 at seven sessions across three days, at seven TCS iON centres.

The PMC published the result with total marks on June 9, 2026 and the subject-wise result on June 15, 2026, on its official website. On 19 June, 2026 it declared the list of candidates eligible for document verification, in the prescribed 1:3 ratio.

The PMC chief said they verified original documents and certificates on June 24, 25, 29 and June 30, 2026, and gave candidates who had remained absent a final opportunity on 1 and 2 July 2026. The Staff Selection Committee met on August 28 2026, and the PMC issued appointment orders to 146 candidates out of the 169 vacancies, he said.

“After the PMC published the document verification list on June 19, 2026, an image purporting to show a question and its answer options from the examination began circulating on the social media platform X. We referred it to IBPS and directed a full integrity review,” Ram said.

“The image identified its own source. Within a session every candidate answers the same hundred questions, but the system randomises the serial position of each question and the order of its options separately for each candidate. No two candidates see the paper in the same form. IBPS matched the position of the question on screen, the sequence of its options and the time remaining against system records, and traced the image to a single candidate, at a single terminal, in Session 1 of April 23, 2026,” the PMC commissioner said.

“The circulated image and the data logs together identified three candidates. Each showed the same pattern: they scanned nearly all questions without answering them in the opening thirty minutes, then answered in rapid succession, and a washroom visit preceded every spike in responses. Their rough sheets were either absent or did not match the questions attempted. CCTV footage for these three candidates corroborated the log findings independently,” he said.

The PMC chief said the data rules out any leak of the question paper before the examination. “Had the paper been available in advance, the logs would show a wholly different pattern, namely, rapid answering in the first thirty minutes. No log shows that. Three individual candidates committed malpractice inside the examination hall. The scores of every other candidate stand unaffected,” he said.

“An online examination is verifiable in a way an offline one is not. Because the system randomises the paper candidate by candidate, a leaked screen betrays its source. The system records every action. Each question visited, each response entered, each save, each time-stamp. It can reconstruct a candidate’s conduct minute by minute, months after the event, and the record is durable and independently auditable. TCS, the technology partner, and M/s Ernst & Young, the examination integrity service provider, each corroborated the findings separately,” he said.

The PMC, he said, has declared the scores of the three candidates non-genuine and cancelled their candidature. “It has also identified two functionaries whose movements coincided with the candidates’ washroom visits; the venue partner had supplied both as fixed manpower, one an electrician, the other infrastructure staff. PMC and IBPS have jointly registered an FIR against the three candidates and the two functionaries who connived with them. No officer or employee of the Pune Municipal Corporation, IBPS or TCS was found to be involved in any manner. The police will now analyse all this evidence in the case independently,” the commissioner said.

He added, “All available evidence and data logs show no indication that the paper leaked or that the process was compromised. The breach was individual, it was contained, the system’s own analytics detected it, and the Corporation acted before it made a single appointment.”