PIONEER NEWS SERVICE | Dehradun
Dehradun police arrested two men, Ayush Kumar Pathak and Pranav Kumar, for running an interstate racket that arranged impersonators to take competitive exams for other candidates in exchange for money. The Dehradun senior superintendent of police Ajai Singh said that during the CBSE recruitment exam at Kendriya Vidyalaya ONGC, Dehradun on April 20, CBSE officials identified a suspicious candidate. After verifying documents and questioning him, they discovered that he was reportedly impersonating another candidate.
The impersonator, Ayush Kumar Pathak, confessed to appearing in the exam on behalf of Gautam Kumar Paswan from Dhanbad, Jharkhand. Police registered a case under sections 61(2), 319(2), 318(4), and 336(3) at Cantt police station. The SSP said that the police interrogated Pathak, who revealed that he lived in Prayagraj and prepared for SSC exams. He met Pranav Kumar, a resident of Rajgir, Nalanda, Bihar, who had been running a cheating racket for years. Kumar promised Pathak a large sum of money to impersonate candidates in various exams. Kumar had already used Pathak to write two other exams for different candidates, as per Singh.
He informed that for the recent CBSE exam, Pranav offered Ayush Rs 3 lakh to appear on behalf of Gautam Paswan. He brought Pathak to Dehradun, gave him the admit card, and sent him to the exam centre in an auto-rickshaw. Based on Pathak’s statement, police tracked and arrested Kumar near Kaulagarh Road. They seized Rs one lakh in cash, three mobile phones, a PAN card used as a fake ID and the admit card.
The SSP said that Pathak told police that Kumar fixed deals with candidates before they filled out online exam forms. He collected photos of both the original candidate and the impersonator and used a mobile app to merge the two faces. They uploaded the morphed photo while submitting the form. They also created fake PAN cards using these images to use as ID during exams. He said that in this case, Gautam Paswan agreed to pay Kumar Rs 10 lakh for clearing the CBSE superintendent exam. He paid Rs one lakh in cash and Rs 25,000 through Paytm before the exam. Kumar was supposed to receive the remaining amount after Gautam’s job appointment, as per Singh.
Police discovered that Kumar had arranged such impersonations 10 to 15 times in Bihar, Jharkhand and for central government exams. At least eight to 10 of those candidates succeeded and secured jobs. The SSP said that the CBSE officials managed to detect the impersonation this time due to Aadhaar-linked biometric verification at the exam centre. In previous cases, the accused escaped detection. Police are currently searching for the third accused, Paswan, who is on the run, Singh added.
