AURANGABAD: The Nanded police have busted a racket during the ongoing recruitment for 69 posts of constables and arrested 12 people, including nine candidates, a policeman and two men working for a Pune-based private company.For the past four years, the private company, SSG Softwares, has been assisting the Nanded police with its recruitment process by scanning the answersheets using optical mark recognition (OMR). The company, which was earlier based in Sangli , helped with the recruitment process carried out this year by five groups of the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF), apart from the Nanded police.Using contacts within the private company, the candidates and the policeman managed to fudge the scores of the written exams. The malpractice came to the fore after the answersheets of candidates who scored over 90% marks were checked again.The Nanded police have registered a case under sections 420 (cheating and dishonesty), 465 (forgery), 471 (using as genuine a forged document), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC at the Wazirabad police station.Nanded superintendent of police Chandrakishore Mina told TOI, "During the preliminary probe, we found that two constables attached to the Indian Reserve Batallion, Aurangabad , and the SRPF, Jalna, acted as middlemen and charged Rs 7.5 lakh per candidate to help them score abov 90% in the written exam."

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