RailEnquiry

Ranchi : One is a railway employee, the other an MBBS student; both boast good careers, but allegedly left several youths in Jharkhand, Bihar and Odisha in a great job jeopardy. A CBI team from Bhubaneswar, assisted by its Ranchi counterpart, unearthed an interstate placement racket running up to a few crores in the capital on Tuesday, with the arrest of a Group C employee of Hatia station. While P.V. Satyawati, who is in her mid-forties, was picked up from her rented accommodation at Badri Narayan Gali on Ratu Road, her aide and mastermind Ratnesh ' a wannabe doctor at Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS), Ranchi ' is said to be absconding. According to sources, Satyawati and Ratnesh floated a placement agency by the name of PSR Solutions ' later christened Le Soleil ' in the Tharpakhna area of the capital half a decade ago. "The agency offered youths, mostly students from the three states, railway jobs. They convinced victims that the placements would be made under VIP quota and no written test or interview would be required. All that was needed was a medical test. None of the over 100 youths, who forked out anything between Rs 1 and Rs 16 lakh, were given jobs. In fact, there was nothing to offer in the first place. It was all a scam," a CBI source said. The racket, being run for five-six years, was brought to the notice of the investigating agency by a couple of victims in Odisha. A case (RC 49(A)/2012) was registered with the CBI in Bhubaneswar under Section 420 of the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. Since early morning on Tuesday, CBI sleuths, divided into four groups, raided the Ratu Road house of Satyawati, the Tharpakhna-based office of the fraud placement agency, the RIMS hostel and at quarters in the railway colony allotted in the name of Satyawati. They stumbled upon several incriminating documents, 10 to 20 passbooks of different banks, cheques purportedly signed by students but not yet encashed and even signed blank cheques. Mastermind Ratnesh was, however, not found. The 20-something had taken admission at RIMS in 2007, but sources at the medical college said he was a below-average student. He had even flunked exams a few times, but used his connections to get medical tests on job seekers done at a railway hospital in Sonepur, Bihar. The agency also told the youths to check their reports at www.rrcresults.com, a website linked to a server in the Odisha capital. The CBI team from Bhubaneswar, led by inspector A.K. Mishra, may also arrest Satyawati's son, Pilla Indra Pawan, who ran the day-to-day affairs at their fraud placement agency and lured prospective candidates. Sources said the agency was also probing role of other railway employees in the racket. "Medical examinations on the victims were conducted at a railway hospital, which hints at involvement of more employees of the Hajipurheadquartered East Central Railway," a source said. Satyawati will be produced in a Ranchi court on Wednesday morning before being taken on transit remand by the Bhubaneswar sleuths.