The CBI on Sunday busted a recruitment racket allegedly involving public servants of Directorate General of Mines Safety (DGMS) in collusion with private persons, who manipulated and influenced the members of Interview Board for ensuring qualification of certain candidates in Oral Examination in lieu of huge amount of bribery and recovered bribe amount of Rs 35 lakh in cash in a trap operation.

The agency also conducted searches at 12 locations including Lakhisarai, Dhanbad, Ranchi, Nagpur, Udaipur, Shahdol, Hyderabad, Bilaspur which led to recovery of incriminating documents and articles.

The CBI has registered a case against Deputy Director General (Central Zone), DGMS, Head Office, Dhanbad, Arvind Kumar; two private persons— Kailash Mandal and  Triloki Nath Singh besides other unknown persons on the allegations that Kumar along with the accused private persons and others had entered into conspiracy for showing undue favours to some of the candidates appearing for the oral examination after qualifying   Computer Based Examinations for Managers, Certificate of Competency (Restricted & Unrestricted), conducted by DGMS. They also allegedly manipulated and influenced the members of interview board for qualifying such candidates in lieu of huge amount of illegal gratification.

The Oral Examination was conducted by DGMS between March 8 and March 20, 2021.

“It was further alleged that the Dy. Director General (Central Zone) had got 48 candidates qualified in the said interview who were referred to him by the said private person,” the CBI said in a statement.

For each such candidate, Kumar allegedly agreed to accept an amount of Rs 1.5 Lakh, totaling to Rs 72 lakh, it said.

It was alleged that the said amount was to be delivered in two instalments to another private person (relative of Kumar), at Lakhisarai (Bihar), it further said.