Madras High Court quashes proceedings against Senthamarai Kannan

A division bench of Justice PN Prakash and Justice R Hemalatha had set aside the suo-motu proceeding contending that the IPS officer has no role in placing the wrong document before the court as it is evident that his subordinates have done that.

The suo-motu proceeding was initiated by the Madras HC in 2019 for submitting a document by TNURSB before the court informing that one Murthi is a professor of IIT Madras who had verified the question answer key book for an examination conducted by the TNUSRB for Sub-Inspector (fingerprint) position.

After the examination was conducted, the TNUSRB published the preliminary key answer list for all the questions, including question number 145 of B series question paper in Psychology on December 24, 2018.

For Question No.145, four options, viz., ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ were given in the question paper and as per the preliminary key answer list, the correct answer for Question No.145 is option ‘a’. However, various candidates objected to that and claimed the right answer was option ‘b’.

Therefore, the commission requested one GV Vijayakumar, an expert, to analyze the correct answer. Vijayakumar deputed his student D Murthi to do it. Murthi analysed and said option ‘b’ is correct for question number 145.

When the board declared the same, one of the candidates Arunachalam sent a representation to the board stating that option ‘a’ was correct as declared by the board earlier and wanted his name to be included in the selection list. He also moved the court.

TNUSRB submitted to the court that D Murthi, a professor in IIT had solved it and found answer ‘b’ was right. However, Arunachalam submitted that Murthi was not a professor of IIT-M. Arunachalam informed the court that through an RTI, he found Murthi was a maths teacher in a KV school in IIT.

On hearing this, the court initiated suo-motu proceedings against the TNUSRB member secretary. Besides, the police had arrested Vijayakumar and Murthi on charges of giving fake information. Therefore, Murthi and Vijaykumar preferred a petition before HC that they never informed the TNUSRB that Murthi is a professor with IIT-Madras. Senthamarai Kannan also submitted that he had neither met Vijayakumar nor Murthi.

On recording the submissions, the judges quashed the suo-motu proceedings against the IPS officer. Also, the court directed the state to compensate Vijayakumar with Rs.10 lakh within three weeks for putting him behind the bar for 22 days.