CBI questions Sify COO over SSC paper leak case

New Delhi: The CBI on Friday questioned chief operating officer (COO) C.R. Rao of Sify Technologies Ltd as part of its investigation into the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) leak paper case.

According to sources,  Mr Rao was asked pointed questions by the agency sleuths during questioning. “He was specifically asked as how Sify’s central examination back-end  team uploaded the question paper before the exam began and who all had access to the sensitive examination questions data,” sources said.

The CBI on Wednesday registered an FIR against 17 persons, including 10 employees of Sify Technologies Pvt Ltd, in connection with the leak of paper for the combined graduate level examination (CGLE) of SSC. The agency sleuths had also carried out searches at 12 locations, including four offices of the Sify Technologies Pvt Ltd in Chennai, Noida, Mumbai and Okhla (New Delhi) besides the residence of one of its employees, Sant Prasad Gupta in Sheikh Sarai area in the national capital. The search operation of the agency had also covered seven examination labs in Patna, Shimla, Ambala and Jaipur and three places in Delhi. In the CGLE-2017, more than 30 lakh candidates across the country had applied for just over 8,000 vacancies.

There are allegations that the paper of the second tier of the Combined Graduate Level (CGL), 2017, and its answer key were allegedly leaked and became viral on social media. The agency also named seven students in the FIR who had appeared in the examination on the basis of the screen st of the question paper which was allegedly leaked.and became viral on social media.

The examination papers were set in such a way that an examinee got the questions in a certain ‘sequence’, sources alleged. The CBI  managed to locate seven students who would have received those questions in that particular pattern. Sant

Prasad Gupta, custodian of the question bank at Sify, along with nine other employees of the company who were site managers at seven examination centres where the leaked paper had reached, have already been named in the FIR, sources said. The contract for conducting on-line CGL examination for recruitment of the Group B and C services in the central government was given to the Sify Technologies on April 12, 2016. Prior to that, the examination was conducted in optical marks reader (OMR) mode, the FIR has said.