An arrest and a blacklist: Firm at centre of UP police exam leak has a tainted past

Yet, the firm was awarded the contract for conducting the UP police constable recruitment exam that was held on February 17 and 18. At least 48 lakh candidates appeared for the exam for 60,244 police constable posts. Over 2,370 examination centers were set up in 75 districts.

As concerns over the question paper being leaked spread across the state, on February 24, the government cancelled the exam, and the Uttar Pradesh Police Recruitment and Promotion Board issued a blacklist order against the firm.

UP’s Special Task Force (STF), which is probing the role of the Ahmedabad-based company in the leak of the exams, has issued notices to Vineet Arya, but he hasn’t turned up for questioning so far. The STF has filed a chargesheet against 18 persons and is investigating whether any of the arrested persons have links with Edutest’s owner or his employees.

The police have so far not taken any action against any employee of the company for their role in the paper leak case. A senior police officer said the investigation has so far revealed “evidence of negligence” on the part of the company.

On why a blacklisted firm was given the contract for conducting the UP police exams, officials at the UP Police Recruitment Board refused to comment.

On the company’s website, Edutest, which runs out of a plush three-storey building, JBR Corporate House, on Ahmedabad’s Sindhu Bhavan Road, claims to have conducted “1,130 million exams” for government and government education institutes. Sources said EduTest was to conduct an exam for the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) on July 7.

A CSIR official told The Indian Express that this was the first time that Edutest had been hired to conduct an examination for the organisation. The source said that when the agency was hired, sometime in the last quarter of 2023, CSIR was unaware that it had been blacklisted by a state government and that there was nothing in the documents submitted by the agency to suggest that it had been blacklisted for irregularities.

The firm, with a staff of 450, has offices spread across Noida, Lucknow, Patna, Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, and has employees operating out of 26 locations.

The firm is involved in several aspects related to the conduct of examinations — from application forms to payment integration, hall tickets, printing question paper, organising and managing examination centres, scanning answer sheets, preparation of results and uploading the answer sheets.

The company, which was started in 1981-82 as a question paper printing firm, now claims to be the “second-largest testing company” after TCS in terms of revenue, and conducts examinations in digital, from home and paper-pen modes.

Owner Vineet Arya is son of Suresh Chandra Arya, who is originally from Mathura in Uttar Pradesh and is president, Sarvadeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabha, an international Arya Samaj body. While Vineet Arya was director of the firm until his arrest in the Bihar paper leak case in 2017, the company’s current directors are his wife Jaya and son Saksham.

Ruling out rumours of Vineet having fled abroad following the paper scam in UP, one of the senior officials of the company told The Indian Express, “His father Suresh Chandra suffered a brain stroke on June 19 and is undergoing treatment at a private city hospital. The family is currently under extreme stress owing to this health emergency and is taking care of Suresh sir.”

On the UP Police exam, the official said the company was given a work order for 20 lakh candidates but when the applications came, these were 50 lakh candidates. “Also, we were given the work order in November-end/December first week. We needed at least 90 days for preparations, but they asked us to deliver in 40 days,” the official said.

A week after the exam, the UP government cancelled it following investigations that pointed to a paper leak. Around 50 company employees, barring the directors, were questioned by the Uttar Pradesh STF in Lucknow for over 15 days. The UP Police also issued a statement that the case has been solved and that the paper got leaked in the Noida godown of TCI Express, the logistics firm that had been subcontracted by Edutest to deliver the exam papers.

In 2017, the company took a work order from the Bihar Staff Selection Commission for printing question papers for recruitment tests for government clerks and assistants. After the paper got leaked, the Patna Police took 40 persons in custody, including Vineet Arya, BSSC chairperson Sudhir Kumar and BSSC secretary Parmeshwar Ram. While the BSSC chairperson is still in custody, Vineet was released in 2020.

In connection with the paper leak of the Teachers’ Recruitment Examination-3 exam, scheduled for March this year, the Bihar Economic Offences Unit (EOU) has so far arrested 321 people. Among those arrested are Shiv alias Bittu, the son of the alleged NEET-UG paper leak mastermind Sanjeev Mukhiya. The EOU is yet to file a chargesheet in the case.

Refuting any political or community connections, the official said, “All the allegations of support from a particular community or party are completely baseless.”