By Editorial Investigations Desk *Archival Case Dossier INC-2022-BR-PATNA-013 | Verified Commission, EOU & Police Record*
What the candidate discovered on the top floor transformed an administrative delay into a full-scale student insurrection.
Peering through the window of an unnumbered room at the end of the second-floor corridor, the student saw a dozen select candidates seated at tables.
They were not waiting for test papers. Spread out before them were official, printed question booklets of the 67th BPSC Prelims, complete with answer keys and smartphones resting openly on their desks. Some were typing furiously into messaging apps; others were darkening bubbles on OMR sheets with leisurely precision.
The candidate ran down to the courtyard and alerted his peers.
Within minutes, hundreds of furious candidates abandoned their desks, surged up the stairwells, and confronted the college administration.
When college authorities refused to open the doors of the private room, students forced their way in.
Using their mobile phone cameras, candidates began recording the scene: students caught red-handed with question papers fifteen minutes before the rest of the centre had received them, OMR sheets being marked in private, and college staff frantically attempting to hide question bundles under office desks.
In the courtyard below, chaos erupted. Students seized question booklets from the principal’s office, tore open sealed packets to verify the serial numbers, and shouted slogans against the commission.
By 13:00 IST, police reinforcements arrived with batons to disperse the crowd.
But by then, the physical evidence had already escaped the perimeter of Veer Kunwar Singh College. The smartphone videos filmed by the students had been uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Far more fatally for the testing agency, the question papers inside that room had already been photographed hours earlier.
Inside the fortified headquarters of the Bihar Public Service Commission on Bailey Road, the commission’s leadership faced an unprecedented institutional crisis.
Established in 1949, the BPSC was one of the oldest provincial public service commissions in India. Over its seventy-three-year history, it had weathered controversies over delayed results, viva-voce allegations, and political patronage.
Never once in seventy-three years had its premier Combined Competitive Examination been cancelled due to a question paper leak.
At 16:30 IST, BPSC Chairman R.K. Mahajan, a retired senior IAS officer, convened an emergency meeting of the full commission.
The commission constituted a three-member internal inquiry committee headed by BPSC Secretary Jiut Singh, alongside the Controller of Examinations. The committee was tasked with examining the viral social media images, comparing them line-by-line with the official master question paper sets, and verifying the timestamps.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar intervened directly, summoning the Director General of Police and senior education bureaucrats to his official residence at 1, Anne Marg. The Chief Minister issued categorical instructions: if there was even an iota of truth to the paper leak, the examination must be scrapped immediately, and the perpetrators tracked down without regard to administrative rank.
At 19:15 IST, the three-member committee submitted its confidential report to Chairman Mahajan.
The finding was unequivocal: the questions circulating on Telegram at 11:45 AM were an exact, 100% match with Set Code C of the authentic examination.
At 19:30 IST on Sunday evening—less than six hours after the examination had concluded—the BPSC issued an official press release that sent shockwaves through the state:
*"In view of the report submitted by the inquiry committee regarding the Combined (Preliminary) Competitive Examination held on May 8, 2022, the Commission has decided to cancel the entire examination. A formal complaint has been lodged with the Economic Offences Unit (EOU) to identify and prosecute the cyber criminals and conspirators."*
For 6,02,000 registered candidates, the declaration was an agonizing mix of validation and heartbreak. Their allegations had been proven true within hours, but their monumental labor had been voided in a single stroke.
Over the following four weeks, the EOU expanded its dragnet across Bihar, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh, arresting more than eighteen individuals.
The investigation mapped a sophisticated commercial network: * The Mastermind: Kingpin Anand Gaurav, a graduate of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Patna, had built a multi-crore examination syndicate over a decade, utilizing corrupted government officials, coaching operators, and medical students. * The Safe-Houses: The syndicate operated safe-houses in the Kankarbagh and Boring Road areas of Patna, where high-speed scanners, mobile jammers, and bank transaction ledgers were recovered. * The Candidate Fees: Candidates who sat in the private rooms at Arrah had agreed to pay sums between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 40 lakh for guaranteed qualification through the Preliminary and Main examinations.
The EOU seized mobile handsets, forensic clones of WhatsApp chat databases, and financial accounts containing tens of lakhs of rupees in advance payments.
In the legal history of Bihar’s administrative governance, the 67th BPSC case is remembered as a rare instance of swift state deterrence: an examination cancelled within six hours, an administrative magistrate arrested within forty-eight hours, and a successful retest delivered within four months.
Yet for the five lakh young men and women who lived through those four months, the experience was an exhausting emotional ordeal.
In Bihar, where a civil service post is often the singular redemption for three generations of rural poverty, the cancellation of an examination is a catastrophic family event.
Aspirants who had survived on borrowed money in single-room tenements in Patna’s Musallahpur Hat and Bhikna Pahari—eating plain rice and lentils while studying fourteen hours a day—were forced to find another four months of rent, endure the gossip of village relatives who assumed all examinees were complicit, and rebuild their mental endurance from scratch.
The crisis of the 67th BPSC Prelims demonstrated the eternal conflict at the heart of Indian state examinations: between the millions of honest, impoverished citizens who see the exam hall as the only democratic gateway to dignity, and the corrupt administrative nexus that treats the question paper as an auctionable commodity.
The courageous candidates of Veer Kunwar Singh College who stood up on May 8, raised their voices, and pointed their camera phones at the sealed room did not merely expose a paper leak; they saved the constitutional credibility of their state’s highest recruitment commission.
4. Investigative Press Coverage: "BPSC cancels 67th prelims exam after question paper goes viral on social media." The Times of India (by Faryal Rumi) | May 9, 2022 | Direct Link
5. Administrative Arrest Coverage: "67th BPSC paper leak: EOU arrests BDO, three college staff in Arrah." The Indian Express (by Santosh Singh) | May 11, 2022 | Direct Link
6. Retest Reporting: "BPSC 67th Prelims re-exam held peacefully at 1,153 centres in Bihar." Hindustan Times (by Special Correspondent) | October 1, 2022 | Direct Link
Comments
0Want to participate in the discussion?
No comments yet. Start the discussion above.