A Wide Web of Deceit

At a time when leaks and lapses have disrupted four national competitive exams, putting future of over 3.6 million students in jeopardy, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime in Rajasthan is grappling with a mammoth legacy problem on that front.

- Rohit Parihar

Nearly every government job advertised and filled over the past decade has come under scrutiny for leaked question papers, dummy candidates, fake degrees and forged certificates. More and more skeletons are tumbling out of the closet as the probe picks up pace.

Ahead of the assembly election last year, the BJP had promised to crack the whip against all those indulging in unfair means in recruitment exams conducted during the then Ashok Gehlotled Congress regime. Soon after coming to power in December, Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma tasked Rajasthan Police's Special Operations Group (SOG) with carrying out a thorough investigation into all such cases. Last month, the state government ordered a review of the selection records of some 125,000 government employees recruited during Gehlot's tenure. But the June 23 arrest of a lynchpin-Tulsa Ram, 57, husband of an additional superintendent of police-exposed a deeper nexus stretching back to at least 2012, putting 18 examinations under a cloud for leaks alone.

A week later, the police confirmed the leak of the 2022 forest guard exam paper. It suspected similar issues with the Rajasthan Eligibility Exam for Teachers 2022 even as the district education officers of Banswara and Jalore were sacked for alleged supervisory negligence.

But with reports surfacing that hundreds have got jobs reserved for tribals for which cut-offs are comparatively lower-using dummy candidates, the government is in a fix. Cancelling all such exams will mean also punishing many legitimate and deserving recruits.