KPSC Recruitment Racket: How Confidential Merit Lists Allegedly Became a Tool for Extortion

When the Karnataka Public Service Commission published its shortlist for veterinary officer posts in February, it named three candidates for each of the 400 vacancies but it didn’t reveal their scores. The Enforcement Directorate alleges that this information was available to insiders. The agency says commission members leaked the confidential merit list, along with question papers and candidate-specific answer keys, to demand bribes. It told a special court that officials asked the commission’s controller of examinations, Gyanendra Kumar Gangwar, about the prospects of named candidates. A candidate whose marks pointed to selection could then be approached by an official or an intermediary to negotiate a price.

According to the agency, information meant to rank applicants became leverage over people waiting for a job. The examination was held on January 8 and 9. About 1,400 candidates sat for it and 329 were selected the following month. The ED describes two routes by which questions or answers allegedly reached candidates in advance. In the first, Basavaraj Kannale, a member of the Tumkur University syndicate, is alleged to have taken candidates to a resort near Bengaluru the day before the exam, given them answers to 80 questions and made them memorise them under supervision. Vehicles arranged by Kannale or his associates, the agency says, then took them to their examination centres. The ED has put the number of such candidates at 10. It says Kannale claimed to have helped nine. According to the agency, he quoted a price of Rs 80 lakh a candidate, settled at Rs 30–40 lakh, and passed about Rs 1.30 crore of the Rs 1.52 crore he collected to Gangwar in cash.

In the second case, the ED alleges, answer keys were supplied to some candidates by the commission’s chairman, Shivashankarappa S. Sahukar, and its member BV Geetha. A separate question concerns what happened to answer sheets after the exam. At an August bail hearing, prosecutors said investigators had seized the OMR sheets of the 329 selected candidates and were awaiting forensic analysis. One candidate named in the case argued that her retained copy matched the published answer key. The court rejected her plea for anticipatory bail. Its order records allegations and arguments at an early stage and makes no finding that she altered her result. An unsuccessful candidate, the veterinarian Dr S Manjunath, is named in the court record as a complainant.

The case is not simply about a question paper leak. It reveals who could see marks, answer sheets and candidate identities after the test and exploit this information. Taken together, all aspects of the case point to a systemic break that has been allowed to exist for decades, by both BJP and Congress-led governments. The High Court has rightly observed that “the public are losing faith in the system of examinations.” For a family that has spent years paying for coaching, travel and repeated attempts, a government job is a promise that effort can still be recognised by a public institution. If the people who administer selection can privately see a candidate’s chances and allegedly sell access to the outcome, the damage is not confined to the candidates named in a case. It affects everyone who has to decide whether to keep preparing.

The CID took Gangwar into custody in late August after two days of questioning. He and Kannale were later held by the ED. On October 6, after a second search of Sahukar’s home in Bengaluru’s Dollars Colony, the ED arrested him and Geetha. In a press release, the agency said Geetha had collected Rs 20 lakh in cash as an advance against an agreed Rs 40 lakh from one candidate, and Sahukar Rs 10 lakh against Rs 20 lakh from another. It said it had recovered signed blank cheques and promissory notes worth Rs 80 lakh from a successful candidate. On October 19, the ED told the special court that handwritten notes recovered in a search recorded cash collected between August and December 2025, more than Rs 4 crore in all, and transferred to Sahukar in batches. Sahukar denied the cash dealings. He and Geetha were remanded to judicial custody until October 25.

Sahukar had joined the commission as a member in 2019 and became its chairman in 2021. His tenure was already under scrutiny over the selection of his daughter, Suma, who sat the industrial extension officer examination in July 2025 under a backward-classes category. The Governor suspended him on August 25. The High Court quashed the suspension on procedural grounds without examining the allegations. Sahukar has admitted an error in his daughter’s case but denied any role in the recruitment scam.

On September 21, Justice M Nagaprasanna of the Karnataka High Court declined a CBI probe and constituted a five-member Special Investigation Team, headed by the senior IPS officer Alok Kumar, to investigate afresh. Days later, the state government transferred Kushal Chouksey, one of the officers the court had named to it. The government then went to the Supreme Court, arguing that the CID had already completed about 80 per cent of its investigation. On October 1, the Supreme Court stayed the High Court’s directions. On October 13, it passed fresh orders. Alok Kumar and the Forensic Science Laboratory chief Divya Gopinath were dropped and the Director General of Police was authorised to nominate the team’s head. The SIT was to take over the CID’s investigation rather than begin a new one.

The ED has told the special court that 13 recruitment drives conducted between 2024 and 2026 need investigation. The defence has challenged its basis for extending the inquiry beyond the veterinary case. A separate case has since reached another stage of selection. The Karnataka High Court has denied anticipatory bail to the commission member Dr Shantha Hosamani who is accused of accepting illegal gratification to favour a candidate at an interview on May 8, 2026, for one of 384 gazetted probationer posts. A sessions court had rejected her plea on September 10. Justice S. Vishwajith Shetty held that the prosecution material prima facie indicated misuse of her official position; the marks she awarded at the interview were placed before the court in a sealed envelope. Hosamani also appears in the veterinary inquiry. In custody, Gangwar allegedly named her, with Sahukar, Geetha and the member Elfreda D’Silva, among those who had approached him about particular candidates. The ED searched her premises in August.

Over the years, each scandal at the commission has produced a reform proposal, and each proposal has met the same fate. After allegations involving an earlier recruitment, a committee led by the former UPSC chairman PC Hota recommended, among other changes, a broad-based search committee to appoint the commission’s chairman and members. When the cabinet acted on the report in the year 2020, it cut the ratio of candidates admitted to the mains from 1:20 to 1:15 and raised the chairman’s grade. It declined the search committee and kept the power to choose members.

On February 3, 2023, the second Karnataka Administrative Reforms Commission, in a report by T M Vijayabhaskar, recommended cutting the commission’s strength from 14 to eight, partly because confidentiality is hard to keep among so many members. Four weeks later, the Chief Minister directed that the strength be raised to a chairman and 15 members. The regulation was amended on March 15, 2023, and a new member was appointed. In March 2025, the cabinet announced that it would cut the commission to eight members and have a search committee led by the Chief Secretary select them. On July 31, 2026, as the state prepared to fill more than 70,000 government posts, the government constituted a Competitive Examinations and Recruitment Reform Committee under the former chief secretary SV Ranganath. Its members include Vandita Sharma, the Chief Minister’s financial adviser LK Atheeq, and Vijayabhaskar, whose recommendation to shrink the commission was answered three years ago by enlarging it.

The suggestions that recur across these proposals are few and unremarkable, including appointments made through a transparent process, published marks, access to candidate data with an auditable trail, and a route for complaints. The Ranganath committee, then, will be judged by whether its recommendations can become rule that will reform the broken system.