Jobs scam in Bihar: BPSC chief, eight others held

Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) Chairman Ramsinghasan Singh, and the BPSC's deputy secretary, member and six other employees were arrested today on charges of forgery, cheating and indulging in corrupt practices in selecting 184 candidates to the Bihar Administrative Services (BAS) and remanded to 13-day judicial custody.

Special vigilance Judge Ram Niwas Prasad remanded them to judicial custody till January 10. Additional Director-General of vigilance bureau, Neelmani, told reporters the government had handed over to the bureau the responsibility of probing the rampant irregularities in the selection of the candidates on December 7.

Following this, an FIR had been filed at the vigilance police station here and charges were brought against 13 BPSC officials, including former Chairman Razia Tabasum, in the case.

Nine were arrested as they could not give satisfactory replies on being summoned to the vigilance office on Bailey road, he said, adding, the others had been asked to explain their positions before the bureau soon. "Glaring irregularities" were detected in the selection process of 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the candidates, Neelamani said.

Neelamani also said he did not rule out the officials taking huge amounts of money as bribes while making recommendations to the government for elevation of the selected candidates to the BAS.

The vigilance bureau, he said, had enough evidence to prove the officials' complicity in the irregularities as several files, relevant documents, computer CDs and other data were recovered during the raids carried out by vigilance officials on the BPSC office.

Besides the BPSC chairman, the others arrested were Deputy Secretary Syed Massom Ali, Commission Member Shiv Balak Chowdhury, Routine Clerk Kamata Prasad, Librarian Sanjiv Kumar, Computer Programmers Bhanu Prakash and Vijay Kumar, Section Officer Ratnesh Prasad, Assistant Tejnarain Singh, vigilance bureau sources said.

The arrested were booked under Section 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 470 (forging documents) of the Indian Penal Code, besides the prevention of corruption act, the sources said.

The selected candidates were elevated to the BAS through the first limited competitive examination of 2003, the result of which was published in May.

After handing over the probe by the government, a team of vigilance sleuths had on December 7 raided the office of the BPSC and had seized documents relating to the examination. However, little cooperation was received from BPSC officials, who had earlier refused to hand over the documents of consequence for the vigilance inquiry, the sources said.

Following this, the vigilance officials had moved the Patna High Court, which directed BPSC officials to cooperate with the probe team and hand over all requisit documents, including answer sheets, tabulation sheets to the vigilance department, which was to file a sealed cover report to the court on January 3, 2006.

The direction was given by Justice SK Katiar while hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the results of the examination.

The petitioners had alleged irregularities were committed and pleaded for cancellation of the results and conduct of fresh examination.

They also alleged that the strong room in the BPSC office, where their answer scripts had been kept was found broken.

Earlier, a limited number of seats in the BAS were filed by candidates from class three services by the process of nomination.

The state government had decided in 1991 that quota posts in the BAS would be filled up by personnel of the class three services through a limited examination. It was in pursuance of this decision that the examination was conducted in 2003.