TSPSC leaks: confidence shattered, job aspirants expect quick justice Premium

The fraud came to light when the police received a call on its emergency number 100 about some fraud in Assistant Engineers (AE) recruitment test held on March 5, 2023

The mother of a 26-year-old girl rushed home from her school duties as soon as news of the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC) paper leak was splashed in the media. Anxiety written all over her face, the teacher in a government school dreaded that her sensitive daughter might resort to the extreme step out of disappointment or distraught over her two-year preparation going waste.

After reaching home, she panicked when the door was not opened despite several calls but heaved a sigh of relief when her daughter, with tears in her eyes, welcomed her. At least, she was safe!

A young school teacher testing her luck with the Group-I examination after taking leave for two months for preparation joined back with anger and anguish clearly visible. “I didn’t expect such an outcome for my three years of effort and two months of leave from the school,” the crestfallen teacher told her colleagues.

In the Osmania University landscape garden, which had turned into nature’s coaching centre, hundreds of students who have been thronging the place for preparation are seething with anger. Most of them have crossed their prime years of student life and are convinced that this was the last opportunity for them to take a crack at Group-I and other competitive exams. After all, most of these notifications were issued after a long wait of eight years since the formation of Telangana.

Similar sentiment prevails at the City Central Library in Chikkadpally, another hub of job aspirants. After years of wait and toil that consumed their precious youth and tonnes of money, these energy-sapped aspirants are not just angry but seem to have lost hope in the system. How can two or three persons take an entire State for a ride and shatter the dreams of lakhs of parents and students, and the system just shut its eyes without noticing the fraud.

When confidence goes for a toss everything is lost, says Ramesh Naik (name changed), who has applied for three examinations including Group-I. He didn’t qualify in Group-I prelims but strongly feels it was due to the paper leak. He and his friends sitting under the huge Ashoka tree in the OU Landscape Garden are disheartened. “What is the guarantee that all the exams conducted so far were free from fraud and also the future exams would be fair,” they say in unison. “Now, we don’t even trust our own friends and relatives who cleared the competitive tests and secured jobs.”

After the leakage scandal broke out and the government found that it was an insider’s job, who have fallen to the vices, this was bound to be the reaction. Some call it a honeytrap given the involvement of a Gurukul School teacher Renuka, who apparently enticed the TSPSC employee Pulidindi Praveen Kumar to sell the papers. He, in turn, used the services of the network incharge Rajshekhar Reddy to hack the systems in the confidential section and steal the papers. Others call it greed for money and unacceptable lacunae in the system. As the investigation is on, more skeletons are tumbling out with the role of many more accomplices in the chain surfacing.