LIC exam paper leaked in Delhi, Hyderabad

New Delhi/Hyderabad: The question papers of Sunday’s Life Insurance Corporation recruitment exam, for which 1,65,000 aspirants appeared at 150 centres across India, were leaked in Delhi and Hyderabad hours before the test. Seven members of two gangs selling the papers were arrested. The exam has not been cancelled.
In Delhi, the crime branch arrested a failed IAS aspirant, Pawan Kumar, and his accomplice for leaking the papers to at least four candidates who allegedly paid Rs 5 lakh each. The department raided four centres in Delhi and Punjab where the exam for 250 posts of assistant administrative officer in LIC was being held. The four aspirants were also arrested. “The question papers have been leaked. We tallied copies of the leaked papers with the original and they were the same,” said Ashok Chand, deputy commissioner of police (crime branch). Chand said they went to three centres in Delhi and one in Chandigarh to cross check.
EdCIL, a public sector organization that conducts the exam, said it would await the police report. EdCIL chairman and managing director Anju Banerjee told TOI, “We decided to go with the exam. Any decision on cancellation would be taken only after the police report comes. So far, I have come to know that all the papers reached in sealed packets at all the centres”.
Kumar, a 33-year-old geography graduate from Delhi University’s Shivaji College, was arrested on Saturday night from Naraina village in west Delhi. He revealed the names of candidates who he got the papers from him. Kumar hails from Bihar and has been in the trade since 2005, police said. In Hyderabad, police arrested five persons and seized copies of the question paper, six mobiles and some cash from them. They too confirmed that the copies matched with the actual question paper.
A Hyderabad task force team raided the house of P Ashok Kumar, a car driver from Gandhinagar, and apprehended him along with Yogesh Kumar Rao, a teacher from Uttar Pradesh, B Anna Rao, a supervisor at a club in Begumpet, P Srinivas, a technician at a car workshop and G Srinivas, a sales officer in bio fertilizers. Ashok and Srinivas were earlier arrested by CBI sleuths in the Railway Recruitment Board question paper leak. They had recently got bail and went back into the trade.
According to task force DCP V B Kamalasan Reddy, Yogesh managed to get a photocopy of the question paper on February 23 from his childhood friend Lal Bahadur of Lucknow, who in turn secured it from his relative Dindayal, an employee of a printing press in Noida where the papers were printed.
Yogesh landed in Hyderabad on February 25 and handed the papers Ashok, his agent who had already selected prospective customers from coaching centres across the state. Police said the gang’s usual practice was to gather the aspirants at a secret location a day before the test and give them the question paper after collecting their original degree certificates. If the leaked paper matched the original, the candidate paid Rs 1 lakh after appearing for the test and Rs 6 lakh if he got selected. This time, however, they called the aspirants a few hours before the exam.
The Delhi Police raided three Kendriya Vidyalaya centres – Andrews Ganj, Janakpuri and R K Puram. Main accused Pawan Kumar’s associate, Arun Parashar, was also arrested. Parashar is from Aligarh. The four candidates who bought the papers from them – Inderjit, Rahul Kumar, Praveen and Dharamvir – are from Delhi and Bihar.The crime branch had got hold of copies of two sets of question papers, one each for the morning and afternoon sessions, from Kumar on Saturday evening.