The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)  has finally nabbed the  key accused in the CAT 2012 scores scam. You may recall that 80 scores had been tampered with in the 2012 CAT exam, which had been conducted by IIM Kozhikode. Allegedly, an insider had altered the scores of a set of students in return for cash rewards.

PaGaLGuY had written a series of articles on this scam then. Three years have passed, and the CBI arrested one Vikas Bansal (36) earlier this week in Ghaziabad. He was produced in the Ernakulam Chief Judicual Magistrate Court in Kerala yesterday, and has been remanded to CBI custody for four days.

Bansal has been alleged to have made at least Rs. 8 crores from the 80 candidates whose scores were altered. It is yet to be disclosed how exactly it was done, but PaGaLGuY had earlier found that a data entry operator based in IIM-K had tampered with the scores and fled when the scam was revealed.

Dr. MG Sreekumar, Adjunct Professor (Humanities & Liberal Arts) and Chief Information Officer, IIM-K, said that the accused simply took advantage of the attraction that an MBA degree holds in India. “[Bansal] worked out a deal and probably promised seats in some of the private colleges accepting CAT, and some students desperate for a seat got swayed,” he said.

A few months ago, two more people were arrested in relation to the same scam. Interestingly, PaGaLGuY was the first to try and find a connection between the IIM-K scores tampering case and the NMAT case where about 87 MBA aspirants had hired ‘others’ to take their exam by proxy, which also took place in 2012. Then too, a person named Vikas Bansal had been arrested and remanded to judicial custody in Mumbai, but was able to get bail. If a more unified effort to track the accused in both cases had been there, it would help streamline some of the flaws in India’s education system that are regularly taken advantage of by criminals.