The Std X board exams are currently underway
Around 200 students are writing their papers at this centre.
The original candidates have also been booked by the police and will not be allowed to sit for papers of other subjects during the ongoing exams, said a senior official of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) . Assistant police inspector Vinod Laturkar of the Mangalwedha police said, “The dummy candidates were sitting in various exam halls at the centre. The incident took place at the Shri Balkrishna Vidyalaya exam centre in Nandeshwar, which falls under Mangalwedha police station in Solapur district. All the dummy candidates are from a Sangli-based academy that prepares candidates for recruitment to the police, army and forest cadres. The students in whose place they sat are all from the Sutar International School in Laxmi Dahiwadi of Solapur. The matter came to the fore when invigilators, while checking the exam hall ticket and school identity cards, found that the photos of some enrolled candidates in their rolls and those writing the papers were not matching. The authorities then downloaded the hall tickets from the state board exam website to verify and found that some of the candidates had forged hall tickets. In one of these eight halls, an invigilator found the photo on the hall ticket produced by the dummy candidate not matching with the list provided to them. The dummy candidate looked older as well. Upon strict checking in the whole centre, it was found that nine male and one female (minor) were appearing for the students from a single school for Marathi language paper. We also found that these dummy candidates are preparing for recruitments at a Sangli-based academy. They claim that they haven’t been paid for this activity, but we will probe deeper and take action accordingly. The dummy candidates were identified as Vishwajeet alias Babu Chavan, Vaibhav Pawar, Sachin Bodhgire, Prakas Adalgi, Samadhan Rupnar, Akash Patil, Prakash Birajdar, Rohit Bandal and Dharmatma Azad. They had school identity cards and forged exam hall tickets.