MARGAO: Recruitment of Awal Karkuns in the office of South Goa District Collectorate in 2013-14 has come back to haunt the government authorities.
Activist Swati Kerkar on Thursday lodged a FIR with the Margao police under the Prevention of Corruption Act against the departmental selection committee in the District Collectorate in connivance with the selected candidates for committing illegalities in the recruitment of the Awal Karkuns.
Kerkar has suspected a scam and a fraud in the illegal and opaque manner in which the evaluation procedure was modified without following the procedure, the illegal and corrupt action taken by the selection committee and the conflict of interest of government officials, elected officials and possible access and leakage of question papers.
Saying that the job of the selection committee was to scrutinise the documents submitted by the candidate, Kerkar, however, claimed the committee has not even looked at these documents and have finalised these candidates on arbitrary and corrupt grounds. She claimed that some of the candidates submitted fake experience certificates, while certificates were obtained from unrecognised universities. “There were job certificates that have been issued on Sundays. Job certificates that show the candidate was working in Mumbai for six years while the residence certificate shows the candidate was working in Goa for last 15 years. There were certificates without reference numbers and date of issue, while certificates were issued from fake or non-existent computer institutes”, she claimed.
She pointed out that one of the candidates who had threatened to expose the job scam was appointed by the Collectorate office after he was made to withdraw his writ petition in exchange for the post.
“Collector Venancio by-passed all the rules to de-reserve the ex-servicemen reserved seat within just two days and gave this candidate the post”, she said.
Kerkar has demanded to know why the Collector had arbitrarily changed the rules of the marking system criteria without following the set procedures and guidelines. Why did Deepali Naik resign from the selection committee after short-listing the candidates? Knowing that her “relative” was answering the written exam, why didn’t she resign before the exam, she asked and sought to know whether her relative was appointed.
She has demanded a probe into the role of then Collector N D Agrawal and incumbent Collector Venancio Furtado, all the selection committee members and also called for investigating the authenticity of documents submitted by the candidates and prosecute them for forgery and fabricating fake documents.
