Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi: Chairman of Railway Recruitment Board,
Mumbai, was arrested by the CBI in Hyderabad on Wednesday in connection to a multi-crore scam that it unearthed on June 19.
The investigating agency had earlier arrested eight persons, including Vivek Bhardwaj Sharma, son of S M Sharma, chairman of RRB Mumbai who was later suspended, A K Jagannatham, the then ADRM in Raipur and his son Srujan for allegedly leaking exam papers for money.
The scam seems to be not limited to Maharashtra with the CBI also arresting G Sethi, senior divisional personnel officer at Raipur in the case today.
Rattled by the multi-crore job scam involving its officials, Railways had yesterday decided to curtail the powers of chairmen of Railway Recruitment Boards and adopt "checks and balances" in the examinations procedure to prevent leakage of question papers.
"We have given too much of responsibility to the chairman. The chairman should not have so much access to everything and therefore we are putting in necessary checks and balance in the examination system to prevent leakage of question papers in future," Railway Board chairman Vivek Sahai said Tuesday, adding the necessary steps will be taken "very soon."
Railways are also mulling changing the selection procedure for question papers. Currently, each RRB is preparing its own set of questions.
As per the new system under consideration, question papers will be selected on random basis to make it more transparent.
Leakages in one centres will have no impact on other centres as the students will be provided multiple set of questions, Sahai said.
Regretting the incident which has stalled the recruitment process in Railways, Sahai said, "We are sad that such a thing happened. We are taking steps to prevent it."
Railways which had vacancies of about two lakh posts had started the recruitment exercise of filling about 40,000 posts in phases.
Railways are conducting internal audit to find out loopholes in the examination system.
-PTI inputs
