Sannigrahi in New Delhi on Wednesday. (PTI)

New Delhi, May 5: A young man from Calcutta has been arrested for submitting a forged mark sheet to get a pilot’s licence and then forging the licence itself when his application was kept pending, Delhi police said today.

Deputy commissioner of police (crime) Ashok Chand announced the arrest of Anirban Sannigrahi, 22, and also that of Param Prakash, 21, a Haryana youth who had allegedly obtained his pilot’s licence on the strength of a forged mark sheet.

“Both the accused were working for private airlines,” Chand said without clarifying if either was working as a pilot.

The arrests have taken the number of pilots held in the fake licence scam to 10. Eight others, including three directorate-general of civil aviation (DGCA) officials, a middleman and two forgers, too are in custody.

Chand said Anirban had enrolled with a flying school in Calcutta in May 2007 after passing his Class XII board exams from a school in the Bengal capital. His father, Ashoke Sannigrahi, lives in Calcutta, he added.

Here is Chand’s version of events:

Anirban trained with the flying school till September that year but “could not fly even a single hour” because the school had no flight instructors or air-worthiness certificates for its aircraft. He then went to Texas, enrolled with the Marc-Air-Incorporation Flying Club, and got a US commercial pilot’s licence (CPL) in May 2008. In June 2008, Anirban enrolled with the DGCA and appeared in two tests — the air navigation composite exam and the air regulation exam — but failed to pass the second. The following month, he met a tout in Delhi who promised him a false mark sheet for Rs 3 lakh.

“Anirban paid Rs 50,000 to the middleman, who submitted the documents to the DGCA,” Chand said. However, he said, some officials became suspicious about the documents and the file was kept pending. “But he (Anirban) got a forged CPL.”

Chand said Anirban had trained at the “Calcutta Flying School” but aviation circles in the Bengal capital said no such flying school existed. They said that in May 2007, when Anirban is supposed to have enrolled, there was only one functioning flying school in Calcutta, the Camellia Institute of Aviation at Behala airport.

Camellia chairman N.R. Datta said: “In early 2007, when the institute started operating, there was hardly any infrastructure at Behala airport. The runway was not concrete and the aircraft had just arrived.”

He added: “We are checking our records to find out whether Sannigrahi had undergone training at our institute. We have to find out whether he had completed the mandatory ground training before taking the flying course.”

Chand said Param Prakash had enrolled with the Kanpur Flying Club in 2006, completed his flying hours and cleared the tests in air navigation, aircraft engine (general), air regulation and aircraft engine (specific) but failed the fifth test, in aviation meteorology.

In December 2008, he allegedly procured a forged mark sheet for Rs 50,000 from a middleman in Delhi. “He submitted it along with other documents to the DGCA and was granted the licence in May 2009,” Chand said.

The fake licence racket came to light in February this year when the DGCA received a complaint that an IndiGo pilot, Parminder Kaur Gulati, 38, had used a forged mark sheet to get her licence. The matter was forwarded to Delhi police and Gulati was arrested on March 8.

The Centre then asked the DGCA to scrutinise the licences of all the pilots in the country and send the names of those under suspicion for investigation. The Centre has also ordered an inspection of the 40 flying schools in the country.

A school run by the Rajasthan government and another in Haryana have been blacklisted for allegedly issuing certificates to pilots who did not have the requisite 200 hours of flying.