Pune: The investigation into a racket involving fake certificates for the Kurash sport revealed that it had spread across the state and the Pune City crime branch found that office-bearers of the Maharashtra State Kurash Association had distributed over 1,000 certificates since 2016.The police have now begun verifying how many people secured jobs in various state govt departments using these certificates and how many candidates availed themselves of the sports quota across the state.Additional commissioner of police (crime) Tejaswi Satpute and deputy commissioner of police (crime) Gauhar Hasan shared details of the investigation on Tuesday evening. Last week, the crime branch arrested Maharashtra State Kurash Association president Ankush Nagar and secretary Shivaji Salunkhe in connection with the case.Satpute said, “The investigation revealed that certificates were issued to people who had not actually participated in Kurash competitions, showing them as sportspersons. These certificates were used in recruitment processes for various state govt departments. A 5% reservation is provided for sportspersons in recruitment to various govt departments.”“So far, we have gathered information that around 1,000 such fake certificates were issued by the suspects to provide undue advantage of this reservation. They charged between Rs50,000 and Rs5 lakh for issuing these fake certificates,” she said.Satpute said, “As many as 19 police constables currently undergoing training had produced Kurash certificates to secure jobs with the Pune City police. They had also obtained validity for these certificates. We will verify their validity once again.”Probably used for Grade I and II jobsSatpute said, “We suspect that the fake Kurash certificates were not used only for police recruitment but may also have been used in the recruitment of Grade I, Grade II and other posts in various state govt departments. The police are trying to ascertain how many of the more than 1,000 certificates distributed by the association were used to secure govt jobs, how many candidates availed themselves of the sports quota and how many of them are currently employed in govt service.”Every certificate to be verifiedThe crime branch is investigating how the fake certificate racket was operated, who assisted in running it, what documents were prepared to show that competitions had been held on paper and at what level efforts were made to obtain govt recognition for the certificates. The police face the challenge of obtaining details of all certificates distributed by the association and verifying each of them.
