HC orders suo motu PIL on recruitment scam in Tamil Nadu

The Madras High Court bench here today initiated PIL proceedings, based on a newspaper report on alleged scam in recruitment of teachers and government employees in Tamil Nadu, and issued notice to the state government and others.
A division bench comprising justices N Kirubakaran and R Tharani said since the report in the English daily exposed public cause, the matter would be treated as a suo motu (on its own) public interest litigation.
It ordered notice to officials, including the chief secretary, director of the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption, heads of Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) and Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) among others.

According to the report, several thousand high-paying jobs had been "sold" by private agencies handling the recruitment on behalf of the TRB and TNPSC by tampering with the exam coding sheets to inflate the marks of select candidates over the years.
The PIL would deal with effective and emergent steps needed to regulate and curb malpractice in the selection process for any government job, ensuring fool proof safeguard.
Besides, it also sought stringent action against erring persons, including the government officials, and transfer of the FIR already registered in the matter to a Special Investigation Team, to be appointed by the court or CBI.

The TNPSC and TRB had outsourced the selection process of teachers and Group I to IV service posts to private companies, allegedly compromising on the sanctity of the procedures, the PIL said.

The companies, which also handled services including the National Eligibility Test and State Level Eligibility Test (must for college lecturers) and BT/PG assistant recruitment for schools, had allegedly tampered with coding sheets.
While placing orders for coding sheets, the companies asked the printing press to supply specimen copies of coding sheets without the word "specimen".
They then used the scanned specimen sheets with appropriate answers for the candidates with whom brokers had struck the deal for selection.

A diligent woman officer who compared the marks of 19 selected candidates for lecturers' posts in government institutions with their original sheets and cloned scanned copies found that a fraud had been committed.
The TRB later put the number of fraudulently selected lecturers at about 270 to 280.
The recruitment in respect of several posts has been put on hold after the discrepancies came to light.