Malkangiri: A teacher from Odisha has been arrested in the Gujarat Junior clerk exam paper leak case, police said on Tuesday. The accused has been identified as Saroj Malu, a resident of Malkangiri. According to sources, Saroj was arrested by the Gujarat police with the assistance of Malkangari police. Saroj Malu is a teacher posted at the Malkangiri Kartanapali School.
Saroj was accused of answering the leaked paper of the exam and sharing it with an organised gang from multiple coaching centres in Vadodara and Ahmedabad. Besides Saroj, the Gujarat ATS, which is probing the case, had arrested at least 16 people in the case. They have been identified as Pradeep Nayak, Ketan Barot, Bhaskar Chaudhary, Murari Kumar Paswan, Kamlesh Chaudhary, Mohammed Firoz Alam, Sarvesh Kumar, Mintu Kumar Rai, Mukesh Kumar, Prabhat Kumar, Aniket Bhatt, Raj Barot, Pranay Sharma, Hardik Sharma and Naresh Mohanty.
Also read: 12 day remand of 15 accused arrested in Gujarat junior clerk paper leak case
The sixteenth accused Jit Nayak was arrested from Hyderabad and the process was on to get him to Ahmedabad. The competitive exam for the recruitment of junior clerks was scheduled to be held between 11 am and 12 pm on Sunday. However, the exam was postponed at the eleventh hour due to an alleged paper leak. Over 9.53 lakh candidates had applied for 1181 vacancies of Class III Junior Clerk (Administration/Account) posts.
The examination was to be conducted at 2,995 examination centres across the state. Panchayat Department Development Commissioner has said that the examination will be conducted within the next 100 days. The postponement of the exam due to the paper leak caused resentment among the job aspirants. The Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation (GSRTC) arranged special buses to take the candidates back home on the production of their call letter for the examination.
