Five arrested in Rajasthan over large-scale irregularities in exam held by Staff Selection Board

The Special Operations Group of the Rajasthan Police on Tuesday (January 20, 2026) arrested five persons, including the technical head of the State Staff Selection Board, on charges of fraud and irregularities in three recruitment examinations conducted in 2019. The accused had allegedly manipulated the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets in the exams.

The examinations were held for the recruitment of supervisors (women’s empowerment), laboratory assistants, and agriculture supervisors. A total of 3,212 posts were advertised under the exams, for which over 9.40 lakh candidates had applied.

The confidential work of scanning OMR sheets and data processing was outsourced to a Delhi-based firm, Additional Director General, Special Operations Group, Vishal Bansal, said here. “The accused tampered with the data stored in computer systems after the scanning process to inflate the marks of some ineligible candidates, helping them clear the exams and get selected,” Mr. Bansal said.

The discrepancies between actual marks and final results were detected upon re-scanning the original OMR sheets. The scanned OMR sheets were digitally altered using image-editing software to mark correct answers, leading to a disproportionate increase in the marks scored by some candidates.

The accused include Sanjay Mathur, the then Deputy Director and system programmer of the Staff Selection Board, who was also technical in-charge of the examination process. The other arrested accused were identified as Shadan Khan, Vinod Kumar Gaur, Poonam Mathur, and Praveen Gangwal, a programmer with the Board.

The accused had received large sums of money for manipulating the results, Mr. Bansal said. They have been booked under various Sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Rajasthan Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, and the Information Technology Act.