New Delhi: On Thursday, Patiala House Court in Delhi rejected anticipatory bail for Puja Khedkar, another IAS trainee charged with forgery in the UPSC examination. Khedkar had moved the court for pre-arrest bail in connection with accusations that she attempted to change her identity in order to be allowed more attempts to write the UPSC examinations.
The court passed the order, and while investigations of the case are still ongoing, the Delhi Police have been ordered to widen their probe. The court also pointed out the desirability of investigating if there was any insider within the UPSC who aided and abetted Khedkar in whatever wrong she had done.
Khedkar clearly crossed all the legal requirements for the job; this provocation was followed by the UPSC canceling her provisional candidature on Wednesday. The commission also restrained her from writing any future civil service examination of UPSC. The UPSC, in their statement, said that Khedkar violated the provisions of the CSE-2022 Rules, which automatically voided her provisional candidature. Out of over 15,000 candidates reviewed by the commission from 2009 to 2023, Khedkar was the only candidate who tried to change even her parent’s name with the intention to take more than probable attempts. The UPSC acknowledged the tracked changes in its SOPs, stating that these were undetected and that the commission has since worked to improve the procedures to avoid similar occurrences in the future.
Puja Khedkar, who had appeared for the UPSC, had originally scored an all-India rank of 821. The FIR against her was filed after the UPSC lodged a complaint in which she stated all those anomalies in her examinations.
This happened shortly after Khedkar was expelled from the District Training Programme of Maharashtra’s government, a situation that had earlier come with lots of criticisms touching on her integrity.
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