Kolhapur: A case has been registered against 10 people, including one minor, who were found writing the SSC examination’s Marathi language paper on Friday in place of originally enrolled candidates. The incident took place at the Shri Balkrishna Vidyalaya exam centre in Nandeshwar, which falls under Mangalwedha police station in Solapur district. Around 200 students are writing their papers at this centre.
All the dummy candidates are from a Sangli-based academy that prepares candidates for recruitment to the police, army and forest cadres. The students in whose place they sat are all from the Sutar International School in Laxmi Dahiwadi of Solapur. The original candidates have also been booked by the police and will not be allowed to sit for papers of other subjects during the ongoing exams, said a senior official of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) . The matter came to the fore when invigilators, while checking the exam hall ticket and school identity cards, found that the photos of some enrolled candidates in their rolls and those writing the papers were not matching. The authorities then downloaded the hall tickets from the state board exam website to verify and found that some of the candidates had forged hall tickets. Except one, the rest of the dummy candidates are above 18 years of age. The police said the case against them has been registered under sections 319, 336 and 337 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). The nine majors were produced before the Mangalwedha court, which remanded them in police custody till Feb 24. Assistant police inspector Vinod Laturkar of the Mangalwedha police said, “The dummy candidates were sitting in various exam halls at the centre. In one of these eight halls, an invigilator found the photo on the hall ticket produced by the dummy candidate not matching with the list provided to them. The dummy candidate looked older as well. Upon strict checking in the whole centre, it was found that nine male and one female (minor) were appearing for the students from a single school for Marathi language paper. We also found that these dummy candidates are preparing for recruitments at a Sangli-based academy. They claim that they haven’t been paid for this activity, but we will probe deeper and take action accordingly.”The police said they suspect that the Sangli academy runs a racket of dummy candidates. The dummy candidates hail from Sangli, Ichalkaranji, and Athani in Belagavi district of Karnataka. They have enrolled for a residential course at the academy. The dummy candidates were identified as Vishwajeet alias Babu Chavan, Vaibhav Pawar, Sachin Bodhgire, Prakas Adalgi, Samadhan Rupnar, Akash Patil, Prakash Birajdar, Rohit Bandal and Dharmatma Azad. They had school identity cards and forged exam hall tickets.
