By Editorial Investigations Desk *Archival Case Dossier INC-2023-TS-HYDERABAD-015 | Verified High Court, SIT & Commission Record*
The Telangana State Public Service Commission operates out of a multi-storey administrative building situated near the historic Nampally railway station.
Within the building, the fourth floor houses the Confidential Section—an enclave fortified with heavy steel doors, biometric thumbprint scanners, and dedicated security guards. Here, examination question banks, answer keys, and moderation files are stored on an isolated Local Area Network (LAN) server, ostensibly disconnected from the wider public internet.
The operational integrity of this sanctuary rested in the hands of a small administrative unit.
Among them was Pulidindi Praveen Kumar, an Assistant Section Officer (ASO) who had joined the commission in 2017. Praveen Kumar was an affable, trusted functionary who handled general administration and frequently ran errands for senior board members.
Crucially, Praveen Kumar had personal ambitions: he had registered as a candidate for the 2022 Group-1 recruitment, dreaming of trading his bureaucratic desk job for the uniform of a Deputy Superintendent of Police.
His collaborator was Atla Rajasekhar, an outsourced network technician who had worked on contract inside the commission since 2014.
Rajasekhar was the computer technician whom everybody called when a printer jammed, an Ethernet cable frayed, or an operating system needed a security update. Because of his operational role, Rajasekhar possessed physical access to every machine in the headquarters and knew the administrative passwords of almost every terminal.
In late 2022, facing personal debts and nursing dreams of sudden wealth, the two men formed an illicit partnership.
Once the digital files were extracted from Nampally, the two men set about converting the commission’s secrets into cash.
The primary customer was Praveen Kumar himself.
Before the October 16, 2022 Group-1 Preliminary Examination, Praveen had memorized the 150 questions from the stolen PDF. On examination Sunday, he walked into his assigned centre as an ordinary candidate and scored 103 marks out of 150—an astonishingly high raw score that placed the commission clerk in the top percentile of the state, comfortably above the cutoff for the Main examination.
Emboldened by their invisible success, the conspirators entered the open market.
Rajasekhar approached his brother-in-law, an assistant engineer named Suresh, and offered the upcoming Assistant Executive Engineers (AEE) and DAO papers.
Praveen Kumar reached out to a former schoolteacher and coaching acquaintance named Renuka, whose husband, Lavdyavath Dhakya, worked as a police constable in Medak district.
Renuka and Dhakya acted as retail aggregators. They combed through coaching institutes in Warangal, Mahabubnagar, and Nalgonda, identifying candidate clients who were willing to pay between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 15 lakh for a guaranteed paper.
The financial pipeline operated through a web of cash handoffs in car parks, post-dated cheques, and promissory notes.
In total, the syndicate sold copies of various exam papers to more than fifty candidates. The buyers included practicing engineers, degree holders, and government employees seeking departmental promotions.
The operation collapsed not because of a cyber audit, but because of reckless over-distribution.
In early March 2023, questions for the upcoming Town Planning Building Overseer (TPBO) test were leaked to a candidate who shared them with a friend.
When that friend noticed identical questions being circulated among rival aspirants on WhatsApp, an anonymous complaint reached the commission’s senior leadership.
On March 11, 2023, TSPSC Secretary filed a complaint at the Begumpet Police Station.
Desperate to salvage its calendar and pacify the student electorate ahead of upcoming assembly elections, TSPSC announced a fresh date for the Group-1 Preliminary examination: Sunday, June 11, 2023.
On June 11, 2023, over 2.33 lakh candidates sat for the exam a second time under heightened security promises.
The board claimed that all loopholes had been plugged. But in its haste to administer the test, the commission committed a fatal procedural blunder: it failed to implement biometric thumbprint verification of candidates at examination centres, citing logistical vendor constraints. Furthermore, examination halls witnessed widespread administrative chaos—invigilators failed to record the serial numbers of question booklets against candidate signatures, and hall-ticket discrepancies went unrectified.
A group of aggrieved candidates, led by aspirant B. Prashanth, approached the Telangana High Court in Writ Petition No. 16560 of 2023, alleging that in the absence of biometric authentication, the commission had made it impossible to verify whether the 2.33 lakh test-takers were genuine candidates or hired proxy solvers.
The hearing before Justice P. Madhavi Devi exposed extraordinary institutional negligence.
During the proceedings, counsel for the petitioners demonstrated that the total count of candidates who signed the attendance registers differed by thousands from the count of OMR sheets received at the evaluation centre.
On September 21, 2023, Justice Madhavi Devi delivered a devastating verdict: The High Court cancelled the June 11 re-examination in its entirety.
The court ruled that an entrance examination to select the highest civil servants of the state cannot be conducted with casual disregard for basic identification protocols:
*"When an examination of this magnitude has already suffered an admitted criminal paper leak, the commission was under a heightened duty to adhere strictly to every security safeguard, including biometric verification. To dispense with biometrics and ignore discrepancies in candidate counts vitiates the sanctity of the selection process. The re-examination cannot be sustained."*
TSPSC appealed to a Division Bench.
On October 13, 2023, a Division Bench headed by Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice N.V. Shravan Kumar dismissed the commission’s appeal, affirming the cancellation order.
For the 2.86 lakh aspirants who had now written the same civil service examination twice within twelve months, the ruling was a catastrophic psychological blow.
The Group-1 exam was dead—for the second time.
In the courtrooms of the Special Sessions Court at Nampally, the criminal trials of over one hundred accused—including Pulidindi Praveen Kumar, Atla Rajasekhar, and dozens of candidate buyers—continue under IPC Sections 409 (Criminal breach of trust by public servant), 420 (Cheating), and 120B (Conspiracy), alongside the IT Act.
Yet the true tragedy of the TSPSC crisis was not legal; it was chronological.
Between October 2022 and June 2024, nearly three lakh young citizens lost two complete years of their adult lives. They lived in an agonizing state of suspended animation—preparing for an exam, writing it, having it cancelled; preparing again, writing it, having it cancelled by a high court; and preparing a third time under mounting economic and emotional exhaustion.
Many crossed the statutory age limits for public employment; many young women were forced by their families to abandon their civil service dreams and enter arranged marriages; many families fell into permanent debt to maintain coaching expenses in Hyderabad.
The crisis of TSPSC 2023 remains the quintessential warning of the modern bureaucratic age: that when state institutions adopt digital systems without enforcing basic internal access controls, the most sophisticated firewalls in the world can be undone by an employee with a ten-dollar USB drive.
4. Investigative Press Coverage: "TSPSC cancels Group-1 Prelims and other exams after question papers stolen by employees." Deccan Chronicle (by DC Correspondent) | March 16, 2023 | Direct Link
5. Legal Reporting: "Telangana High Court cancels TSPSC Group 1 prelims re-exam conducted in June." The New Indian Express (by S. Bachan Jeet Singh) | September 22, 2023 | Direct Link
6. Cybersecurity Reconstruction: "Inside the TSPSC leak: A pen drive, stolen passwords, and the collapse of a state commission." The Indian Express (by Rahul V. Pisharody) | March 25, 2023 | Direct Link
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