BJP National General Secretary and Rajya Sabha MP Tarun Chugh today demanded that the multi-crore Pharmacy Officer recruitment scam be handed over to the CBI, and accused the Kejriwal–Bhagwant Mann duo of shielding the examination mafia that has taken over Punjab's recruitment system. He said the double standards of the AAP leadership now stand fully exposed — the party that built its entire politics on the promise of clean governance is today protecting the very network that is auctioning government jobs to the highest bidder, while the Chief Minister looks the other way.
Chugh said that on July 19, nearly 7,000 candidates appeared for 454 Pharmacy Officer posts across 25 examination centres in Faridkot, Kotkapura and Ferozepur, in an examination conducted by Baba Farid University of Health Sciences on behalf of the Health and Family Welfare Department. Investigators uncovered a sophisticated cheating network operating inside the examination halls — concealed pen cameras, hidden earpieces and battery-operated wireless micro-devices, some of them tucked into turbans, socks and clothing, through which answers were being transmitted in real time to candidates while the paper was still in progress.
He said police investigations have led to the detention of 28 candidates and the arrest of seven key conspirators, besides the recovery of 27 wireless communication devices. Preliminary findings revealed that the question paper was photographed inside an examination centre in Ferozepur and sent out on WhatsApp to a handler in Bhiwani, Haryana, from where it reached a makeshift control room set up in a house in Society Nagar, Faridkot.
The paper was solved there and the answers were relayed straight back into the examination halls. Candidates were charged between Rs. 3.5 lakh and Rs. 13 lakh for guaranteed success, and in several cases post-dated cheques were collected from them as security. The alleged mastermind is an employee of a polytechnic college in Fazilka, and the operatives were drawn from Haryana and Rajasthan — proof, Chugh said, that under this government Punjab's recruitment system has become an open market for an interstate mafia.
Chugh said this was not an isolated failure but the latest link in an unbroken chain. In four years, he said, Punjab has seen the PPSC Naib Tehsildar examination of May 2022, where an interstate cheating racket forced the results of 42,000 candidates to be scrapped; the PSEB Class 12 English Board examination of February 2023, cancelled at the last minute after a paper leak that disrupted 2.5 lakh students; the PSTET of March 2023, cancelled after more than 50 multiple-choice answers were found printed in bold on the paper itself, hitting one lakh aspirants; the PPSC Agriculture Development Officer examination of June 2024, where aspirants alleged the paper for 200 vacancies had leaked days in advance and that a state official had taken a bribe of Rs. 32 lakh; and the PSSSB Group B combined examination of December 2025, where 22 of the top 100 successful candidates came from a single district.
"Every single year of this government has produced its own exam scam. This is not negligence any more — it is a business model," he said. The BJP leader said a seventh case has now reached the Punjab and Haryana High Court. In a writ petition filed against the State of Punjab and the Punjab Subordinate Services Selection Board over recruitment to 197 posts of Excise and Taxation Inspector — for which 1,43,450 candidates had applied — petitioners have placed on record that the official result declared on June 23 carried entries such as "STATE BANK OF INDIA", "PHOTO", "EK DIN KARMAWALA" and "GIPS" in place of candidates' names.
The petition further alleges that individuals were issued more than one application number and more than one admit card and figured in the merit list under multiple application numbers; that a question paper was found with its seal already broken at an examination centre in Ludhiana; that no carbon copy of the OMR sheet was given to any candidate, leaving them with no way to verify their own answers; and that the Board itself admitted through a corrigendum that the advertisement carried a wrong age cut-off, reopening applications barely days before the examination.
Representations submitted both before and after the examination went unanswered, and the government pushed ahead with counselling as though no objection had ever been raised. "When 'State Bank of India' can clear a Punjab government examination and no one in this government even blinks, no honest young person in this state is safe," Chugh said.
Chugh demanded that the entire chain of examination scandals be handed over to the CBI under the monitoring of a sitting judge of the High Court, that the Chief Minister resign owning moral responsibility, and that Arvind Kejriwal and Bhagwant Mann jointly apologise to the youth of Punjab for four years of betrayal.
He said the BJP will stand with every aspirant who has been robbed of a fair chance, and warned that the party will carry this fight to the streets of Punjab and to Parliament until the state's recruitment process is cleaned out root and branch.