Unofficial Secrets

BACK IN AUGUST 2022, the now-embattled IAS trainee Puja Khedkar applied for a disability certificate at the Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial (YCM) Hospital, at the northwestern limits of Pune, in Pimpri. She was looking in particular for one certifying locomotor disability, which refers to conditions such as cerebral palsy or those where the bones, joints or muscles restrict limb movement. This was also around the time, Khedkar, having already cleared the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam, was being summoned by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi for a medical examination of her previously declared disabilities.

The application at YCM Hospital wasn’t Khedkar’s only attempt at securing a locomotor disability certificate. Just a 15-minute bike ride away from YCM Hospital, she made a similar application at the District Civil Hospital in Pune’s Aundh area, except this time with a changed home address. Her application at the YCM Hospital cited an address in Pimpri Chinchwad, and the one in the District Civil Hospital, according to reports, had one of Pune’s Haveli Taluka area. Eventually, the YCM Hospital found only 7 per cent locomotor disability (she is reported to has a torn anterior cruciate ligament in the left knee), and the District Civil Hospital, finding she had already applied for a certificate elsewhere, cancelled her application.

One cannot tell whether she made two applications with different addresses to increase her chances at securing the certificate or even whether the certificate she eventually got, recognising only 7 per cent locomotor disability, had any use for her—since an individual needs to prove a disability of at least 40 per cent to seek concessions for government jobs or exams. But these attempts fall into a larger and suspicious pattern exhibited by Khedkar over the years to seek disability certificates under various categories, sometimes with tweaks to her name or address, to probably secure a UPSC job.

In 2018, for instance, according to reports, she had secured a disability certificate for low vision under the name Puja Diliprao Khedkar (Dilip being her father’s first name) with an Ahmednagar district address. In 2021, she had secured another disability certificate—this one for mental illness—using the same name and address. Just two years before, in 2019, however, according to reports, in her civil services preliminary exams, and later when she was appointed assistant director to the Sports Authority of India, she was registered under the name Khedkar Puja Deeliprao. In the 2021 and 2022 UPSC exams, both of which she got through, although she did not secure a job in 2021, she was going as Puja Manorama Dilip Khedkar. (Manorama is her mother’s first name.)

“This is all very suspicious,” says Vijay Kumbhar, a Pune-based activist and Aam Aadmi Party’s state unit vice president, who was behind many of the discrepancies in her disability and OBC certificates coming out into the open. “And really none of this would have come out in the open, had she not behaved so badly and got everyone so upset.”

Khedkar—who has now been recalled to the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie for “further necessary action” after first being transferred to Washim from Pune—may have been an unknown figure until a few weeks back. But she belongs to a fairly influen­tial family in and around Pune, Kumbhar says, with some of them in high government posts. Khedkar’s father Dilip is a former Maharashtra State Pollution Control Board bureaucrat who unsuccessfully contested the recent Lok Sabha election on a Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi ticket from Ahmednagar. Her mother Manorama is the sarpanch of Bhalgaon village in Ahmed­nagar’s Pathardi tehsil. Her maternal grandfather, Jagganath Rao Budhwant, is also reported to have been a senior bureaucrat. The family was also known to throw their weight around. An undated video that recently surfaced shows Manorama, accompanied by bouncers, brandishing a gun as she gets into a heated argument with some farmers over a disputed farmland close to Pune, in Mulshi. Both Dilip and Manorama, according to police officials probing the allegations of threats to the farmers, are now said to be missing.

An overbearing babu is of course no great surprise. What is interesting though is that she came across so even to her col­leagues. Only in her probationary year, she had become the talk of Pune’s administrative circles, according to reports, ever since she assumed her post of assistant collector on June 3, with her many demands—for accommodation, a separate cabin, vehicle, and so on. At one point, she is believed to have occupied the office of the additional collector Ajay More when he was away. With no government vehicle available, she had her private car—a luxu­ry Audi sedan, which was later found to be owned by a private company with links to the Khedkar family—fitted with a red-and-blue beacon, usually reserved for VIPs and the inscription of “Government of Maharashtra”. The final straw, according to reports, seems to have been when her father, who is believed to have been pushing for her demands, called up a tehsildar and threatened him over the phone. Much of these details have made their way into the district collector Suhas Diwase’s complaint about her to the additional chief secretary (personnel) Nitin Gadre.

In a season of suspicions about the entryways into India’s most prestigious institutions and jobs, Khedkar’s case casts shadows on the most sought after of them all. “How can she get into the UPSC claiming she belongs to a non-creamy layer of an OBC community when the family is very wealthy? How does she get certificates for so many disabilities, when you can clearly see she does not have them? In her Instagram profile, which she has now made private, it was clear she was fit like anyone else. She even says in a mock interview [available online] that my favourite hobby is doodling, and favourite sport is badminton. Can a person with disability claiming low vision doodle and play badminton?” Kumbhar asks.

Khedkar’s father, in the election affidavit Kumbhar pulled out, declared an annual income of ₹43.59 lakh for the financial year 2022-23, with the total value of his assets owned pegged at ₹40 crore. “The property he possesses includes 110 acres of agricultural land, which is way beyond the 54 acres permitted under the Agricultural Land Ceiling Act, seven flats, six shops, a lot of jewellery, many cars,” Kumbhar says.

Although Khedkar has refused to answer queries about her family wealth, she had addressed a question about her income in a mock interview (available online). In the interview, she says she did not show any income in her declaration because although her father was a revenue officer, her mother was divorced, and that she lived with her mother. Her father’s election affidavit however makes no mention of any estrangement with his wife. There is one other way Khedkar could legitimately claim to belong to the non-creamy layer of the OBC category. While government rules stipulate that for someone to be categorised to belong to that community, the family annual income of his or her family must be below ₹8 lakh. This is however meant only for people whose parents are employed in the private sector. Income is not taken into account when one’s parents are employed in the public sector. Khedkar could claim to legitimately belong to the non-creamy layer of the OBC category as long as one of her parents—in this case, her father—did not become a Group A official before the age of 40.

Her attempts at using fraudulently obtained disability certificates—if these allegations are true—to enter the UPSC were enterprising. She secured a disability certificate for low vision and later, one for mental illness, according to critics like Kumbhar, so she could be declared an individual with multiple disabilities or PwBD (Person with Benchmark Disability) level 5—the highest level of benchmark disability in civil service exams—and hence improve her chances of getting through to the service.

Unlike other services in India, UPSC does not recognise benchmark disability pertaining to mental illness, and Khedkar made several pleas to the Delhi High Court and the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), a quasi-judicial authority, in the last few years, according to publicly available records, to get the UPSC to recognise her claim of ‘mental illness’ and ‘low vision with multiple disabilities’. She cleared the UPSC exams in 2021, but reportedly did not appear for medical tests, probably leading to her not being allotted any service. After she cleared the UPSC exams in 2022—ranked 821 and benefitting from her quotas under OBC and multiple disabilities—she reportedly ignored many summons by AIIMS to undergo medical examinations for her disabilities. She was eventually examined by AIIMS and was asked to undergo an MRI (of the brain) to know the cause for her alleged low vision, but she never showed up, and is believed to have later submitted an MRI report done at a private facility that supported her claims of disability. “These instances leave many questions unanswered. How does the UPSC accept these? How did she get her service allotted in 2022 when these claims of disabilities weren’t accepted just one year earlier?” Kumbhar asks. He points to how she was initially posted to Bhandara district, in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, before that was mysteriously changed to Pune district. “Nobody gets their home district in their first year of posting. That, too, Pune which is a sought-after posting among bureaucrats,” he says.

Khedkar’s case shows, according to critics, how you can use influence to hoodwink and get into highly prestigious services like the UPSC. Another case that has emerged recently involves Abhishek Singh who had allegedly got through to the IAS in 2011 using a certificate showing locomotor disability. Singh, who quit the services last year to become an actor and dancer and is now a popular figure online, shows little signs of any such disability in his dance videos.

“It is an open secret that many people use disability certificates to get through to various exams and jobs, or later, when in service, to seek promotions. Manybureaucrats know the system, and they know how to game it for their children,” Kumbhar says. “Khedkar’s is just one case that has come out into the open. Imagine, there must be so many more.”

AhmednagarcheatingIAS probationerLok Sabha electionsPuja KhedkarUPSC