The Guwahati police on Wednesday, 28 October, arrested a Joint Engineering Exam candidate along with his father and three others for allegedly using a proxy to write his exam, NDTV reported.
The others accused, Hamendra Nath Sarma, Pranjal Kalita and Hirulal Pathak, are employees of a testing facility in Guwahati and have been charged with cheating by impersonation, criminal conspiracy and criminal breach of trust.
The accused candidate had secured 99.8 percentile in the exam for admission to the IIT’s and other top engineering colleges in the country, according to Hindustan Times.
“The candidate’s father, Jyotirmoy Das, has paid a huge sum of money, approximately Rs 15-20 lakh, for this purpose,” the complainant alleged in the FIR.
The police started the investigation after a man named Mitradev Sharma filed a police complaint alleging that the candidate went inside the examination hall to mark his attendance and came out with the help of an invigilator. Sharma added that another person wrote the test for him.
“The matter came to light after the candidate reportedly admitted this during a phone call, which was recorded,” Additional Deputy Commissioner (West) Suprotiv Lal Baruah told Hindustan Times. “As of now, we haven’t come across any other case of misrepresentation during the test.”
The police informed that the accused will be produced in a local court on Thursday.
“The candidate came out of the examination hall after biometric attendance with the help of an invigilator and in his place, someone else appeared for the examination,’’ the FIR reportedly read.
Guwahati Police commissioner MP Gupta, told NDTV that the case may be part of a bigger scam. “The staff of the testing centre in Guwahati is also involved,” he said. “We are searching for more people (suspects in the case). This might not be a one-off case but may be part of a larger scam.”
The police alerted the National Testing Agency about the incident and sealed the examination centre.
(With inputs from Hindustan Times and NDTV.)
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