A Hazaribagh man, member of an interstate gang that takes money to help candidates clear various competitive exams using unfair means, has been arrested for supplying vests attached with hi-tech cheating contraptions to 13 aspirants of the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) held on Sunday.
While Shashikant Kumar (27), a resident of Chanda village in Ichak block of the district, was nabbed just before the TET began across nine primary venues around 10am, two candidates were expelled at a centre in Ranchi after they were caught using the vests equipped with a mobile phone, a mini-microphone and a tiny Bluetooth earpiece each.
Police are now looking for the Patna-based gang's Hazaribagh "operations manager", a Home Guard jawan called Brahmadeo Prasad Mehta (32), whom Shashikant has named during interrogation.
A raid at Brahmadeo's Padma Sone residence, 17km from town, has yielded 38 pieces of non-judicial stamp paper while Shashikant's house has spilled academic credentials of candidates, eight vests with contraptions and eight cheques with amounts ranging between Rs 45,000 and Rs 1,20,000.
Addressing a news meet on Monday, Hazaribagh SP Bhimsen Tuti said they tracked Shashikant to Dewangana Chowk following a tip-off and the latter confessed to having supplied the vests to 13 TET candidates. After Hazaribagh police alerted Ranchi and other districts, two candidates were caught in the act from Tupudana and Bariatu exam centres in the capital region.
"The modus operandi is simple, but ingenious. The phone is threaded to the vest to hang near the belly, which allows one to dial a number unnoticed. The Bluetooth earpiece and tiny mouthpiece complete the communication system," Tuti said.
Usually, TET question papers come in four different sets. A candidate, who has paid the gang, is required to dial a number in Patna and just say which set (A, B, C or D) he has received. The person on the other end then relays answers to all questions, which are in objective format, one by one. Later, a powerful magnet, that comes with the rest of the gear, helps the candidate remove the tiny Bluetooth earpiece safely.
SP Tuti maintained that Shashikant was only an errand boy while Brahmadeo ran the show in Hazaribagh for the gang. "The arrested youth only received Rs 2,000 per operation and his job was to lure candidates to the scheme. The gang used candidates known to agents. All the 13 tainted TET aspirants hail from Ichak like Shashikant. The facilitation fee varied from person to person, depending on their economic status. It went up to Rs 200,000."
The senior officer added that Shashikant had confessed to his involvement in three other exams this year to recruit secretariat assistants, fourth grade jail employees and police constables. "But, he is only the tip of the iceberg. The network is across districts. We will round up the remaining 11 candidates who used unfair means in TET to get to the root of the problem. A manhunt has also been launched for Brahmadeo."
Sunday's teacher test was conducted in two phases at 335 centres across nine districts - Ranchi, East Singhbhum (Jamshedpur), Hazaribagh, Dhanbad, Bokaro, Lohardaga, West Singhbhum (Chaibasa), Dumka and Deoghar.
Level One, meant for appointment of teachers for Classes I to V, saw 87,675 candidates while Level Two, meant for appointment of teachers for Classes VI to VIII, had 1.48 lakh aspirants.
