The Commissionerate Police Saturday arrested a staff member of Utkal University on the charges of duping many job aspirants including university students of several lakh by promising to help them get various government jobs.
The 44-year-old accused, Madhab Chandra Sethi, a native of Banki in Cuttack district was produced before a local court that remanded him to judicial custody.
Police arrested Madhab registering a case (350/23) over the allegations of a post graduate student, Basanta Kumar Das, who hails from Nabarangapur district.
Basant, a Post Graduate student of the Anthropology department, during his stay at the hostel of the university in 2018 came into contact with the accused Madhab who works as the Academic Coordinator at the Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education (D.D.C.E.), History Department of the university.
In May 2021, the victim faced severe financial crunch following the death of his father.
Madhab taking advantage of the situation persuaded Basant to pay Rs 12 lakh for the post of Assistant Section Officer (ASO) in the state secretariat.
Accordingly, the victim paid Rs 2 lakh to Madhab while promising to pay the rest following his selection in the ASO examination.
“When result of ASO was published and the complainant could not find his name in the result sheets, he requested Madhab to return the money. But the accused threatened him with dire consequences,” said police sources.
The cops found during investigation that Madhab had also duped several other students following similar modus operandi.
“It is learnt that the accused has cheated many youths on the plea to provide job to them. So far, he had collected Rs 4 lakh each from students Rasmiranjan Parida and Dusmanta Kumar Panigrahi; Rs 70,000 from Smruti Ranjan Swain and Rs one lakh and twenty thousand from Gita Govinda Behera of Bhadrak district,” added police sources.
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