Question paper leak: TSPSC cancels Group-I Prelims, two other exams

Hyderabad: The Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) on Friday cancelled three more examinations, including Group I Prelims, in the wake of leakage of question paper of an exam held to recruit assistant engineers.

At a special meeting, the Commission took the decision to cancel the Group I Prelims conducted on October 16, 2022.

Nearly 2.86 lakh aspirants of Group I posts appeared in the exam across the state.

The Commission also decided to conduct the re-exam for Group I Prelims on June 11, 2023. The examinations held for the recruitment of Assistant Executive Engineer (AEE) on January 22 and for Divisional Accounts Officer (DAO) on February 26 have also been cancelled.

The dates for the conduct of the two examinations will be announced later.

The TSPSC secretary said the Commission took the decision to cancel the three examinations after careful examination of the report of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) and the internal inquiry by the Commission.

The TSPSC had conducted the examination on March 5 for 833 vacancies of Assistant Engineer, Municipal Assistant Engineer, Technical Officer, and Junior Technical Officer in various engineering departments.

A total of 55,000 candidates had written the exam.

However, the Commission suspected leakage of the question paper and lodged a complaint with the police.

On March 13, the police arrested nine people, including two employees of the TSPSC.

Following the arrest of the accused, the Commission cancelled the exam and also postponed other exams scheduled to be held later this month.

Hyderabad Police Commissioner C.V. Anand had handed over the investigation to SIT.

The investigations revealed that P. Praveen Kumar, who was working as Assistant Section Officer (ASO) and Rajasekhar Reddy, a network expert working on an outsourcing basis, copied question papers from computers in the confidential section and shared them with other accused.

The investigations also created doubts that question papers of exams conducted earlier were also leaked.

It was revealed that Praveen Kumar had also written the Group-I exam. His OMR sheet had also surfaced on social media with claims that he secured the highest marks.

TSPSC chairman Janardhan Reddy confirmed that Praveen had appeared in the Group-I Prelims but it was not correct that the 103 marks secured by him was the highest.