Lucknow Police Detain Retired Secretary Over OMR Score Manipulation

In a high‑profile operation on 14 October, Lucknow police seized retired Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Yogesh Kumar on accusations of tampering with objective merit rank (OMR) scores during the 2014 livestock officer recruitment.

The EOW’s investigation uncovered that the OMR sheets, originally meant to be evaluated by district‑level committees, were instead sent to the Faroz Gandhi Institute in Rampur for a centralised appraisal. This step is said to have violated service rules and resulted in the inclusion of unqualified candidates in the final merit list.

The recruitment process, which targeted 1,198 posts across 17 districts, commenced with a written test on 2 February 2014. Following a special investigation team’s report in 2017, formal charges were filed in 2019, encompassing sections 409, 420, 467, 468, 471, 120B and 201 of the IPC, along with provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Altogether, twenty‑eight persons, including Kumar, have been named as accused. Twenty‑five of them already face charge sheets, marking this arrest as a significant development in the probe.