Pune: Shivajinagar police on Friday registered a case against five people for their alleged involvement in malpractice during the junior engineer (civil), class 3 exam conducted for Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) in April 2026.PMC additional municipal commissioner Prajit Nair said details are being shared with the police for further investigation. Shivajinagar senior police inspector Girish Dighavkar said, “We have received the complaint from PMC. A case was registered against the five accused for their alleged involvement in the malpractice. Our investigations are on.”The entire exam was conducted in online format. PMC had declared the results of the exam in June. However, after receiving inputs on the alleged malpractice and misconduct, the administration carried out detailed checks by appointing three agencies. Based on the observations, three candidates who appeared for exams were found with suspicious behaviour at the exam centre along with two employees appointed at the centre.Prima facie, the data by agencies rules out any leak of the question paper before exam. It appears that three candidates were involved in unfair means at the candidate level at exam centre.Nair said that had the paper been available in advance, the logs that were checked would show a different pattern. Instead it appears that on-screen content was captured by a device during the examination. Nearly all questions were scanned without being answered in opening 30 minutes, then answered in rapid succession, with spike in response preceded by washroom visit by candidates. Rough sheets were absent or not commensurate with the questions attempted. The CCTV footage reviewed for three candidates corroborated the log findings independently.Nair said that the scores of three candidates have been declared non-genuine and their candidature has been cancelled. Two functionaries at the exam centre whose movements coincided with the candiates have been removed from their deployment and their resouce IDs blocked from all future assessments. The appointment orders for all other candidates are being issued, he said.
