Explained | Karnataka’s PSI recruitment scam and the rot at the top

With over 60 arrests and the rolling of heads of several top police officials, the PSI recruitment scam has shaken the Karnataka State Police and the government alike, while dealing a blow to the recruitment process.

Story so far: The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on Monday arrested Additional Director-General of Police (ADGP) Amrit Paul in the police sub inspectors’ (PSI) recruitment scam case. He was heading the Police Recruitment Cell, Karnataka, when the scam broke out and it was found that the OMR sheets were allegedly tampered with in the office. Since April, the CID officials have so far arrested over 60 persons, including the topper of the PSI exam, who were allegedly linked to middlemen and officials to get the OMR sheets filled up after submission.

January 1, 2021: A gazette notification for appointment of 545 civil PSIs is published.

October 3, 2021: The written examination is held. Over 54,000 candidates appear for the exam across 92 centres in the state.

January 19,2022: A provisional list of selected candidates is published. 178 candidates are selected from Bengaluru Urban centres and 93 from Kalaburagi.

Irregularities were first noticed in Kalaburagi. In March 2022, Sridhar Pawar, a PSI aspirant who failed to clear the exam, collected a carbon copy of the OMR answer sheet of Veeresh Chandrashekhar, another candidate, who had ranked seventh among 67 candidates selected in the provisional list for the Kalyana Karnataka region. He found that the latter had been awarded 121 out of 150 marks even though he had attempted only 21 questions (out of 100) as per the carbon copy.

While the local police investigated the case at first, the government ordered a CID probe on April 7, 2022. On April 9, based on a complaint filed by the Financial intelligence Unit of CID with the Chowk police station in Kalaburgi, the police registered a case against Veeresh, charging him under cheating, forgery, fraud and criminal conspiracy.

The CID later arrested five other candidates and three invigilators who allegedly filled out the OMR answer sheets for some of the students after the exam. Further probe into the provisional selection list revealed that all the six arrested candidates wrote the exam at the same centre — Jnana Jyoti English School in Kalaburagi.