The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday launched simultaneous raids at seven premises across Hyderabad, Secunderabad and Guntur district, exposing what investigators describe as a brazen, multi-crore subversion of the Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission’s (APPSC) Group-I Mains evaluation process.
Teams from the ED’s Hyderabad Zonal Office swept locations linked to the alleged manipulation of answer scripts for the recruitment to fill 169 posts notified between 2018 and 2021, a period when the YSRCP was in power. At the centre of the operation is Aavasa Resort Haailand in Chinakakani village, Guntur district, where answer scripts were stored, and the so-called manual evaluation was carried out.
ED officials also searched the residence of 1992-batch IPS officer P Sitarama Anjaneyulu, who served as APPSC Secretary at the time, and the premises of Camsign Media and its managing director P. Madhusudhana Rao.
Additional targets included TruGrader Services, a division of Stone Media Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd. that had earlier handled digital evaluation for the APPSC; its MD, AkellaPeriSrinivasa Rao; and MahamkaliRaghuram, who was engaged in the evaluation work.
The money-laundering case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act stems from a 2025 FIR registered by Andhra Pradesh Police at Suryaraopet police station in Vijayawada. The predicate offence alleges criminal breach of trust, cheating, falsification of accounts and criminal conspiracy in the manual evaluation process, during which `1,14,32,312 was paid to the private firm Camsign Media.
Anjaneyulu, who later headed police intelligence as DGP under the previous Government and has already been arrested by the state police in related matters, is named as a key accused in the ED’s Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR).
Special Investigation Team (SIT) findings form the backbone of the probe and paint a damning picture. Camsign Media allegedly kept the Group-I Mains answer scripts at the resort near Mangalagiri for 84 days instead of following standard procedures. Investigators claim 66 unqualified individuals were engaged to transfer pre-determined marks onto OMR sheets without proper CCTV surveillance or institutional oversight.
The SIT also flagged serious irregularities in the earlier digital evaluation phase, including awarding a contract of around Rs 1.38 crore to TruGrader/Stone Media without a tender, selecting evaluators via WhatsApp, and using personal Gmail and Google Drive for official work.
The ED found that the answer scripts of the vast majority of both the selected and the non-selected candidates had been altered. The raids targeted both the public servant in charge of the process and the private entities that did the work. The whole affair appears to have turned a merit-based recruitment exercise into a paid service.
Public money has gone to private players, and the integrity of one of the country’s most important examinations has been systematically undermined by parking thousands of answer scripts at a private resort and having outsiders fix the marks.
The case has once again brought into sharp focus how easily the entire evaluation chain (from digital scanning to manual marking) could be outsourced and tampered with. For the thousands of candidates who took the Group-I Mains, the ED action offers little solace at this stage.
It is, however, the most aggressive federal intervention yet in a scandal which has already done a great deal to undermine confidence in the public recruitment system in Andhra Pradesh.