JAMMU/SRINAGAR: The paper leak that Union health minister JP Nadda invoked this week to deflect blame from the Centre has a longer history than his press conference revealed.
It began in March 2022, when the Jammu and Kashmir Services Selection Board (JKSSB) conducted a sub-inspector recruitment exam that was later found to have been compromised. This eventually grew through 2022 and 2023 into a sprawling trail of recruitment and welfare-scheme scandals across the Union Territory.
At that time, J&K had no elected government. A Lieutenant Governor answerable directly to the Centre was in charge and continues to be in hybrid mode.
That distinction is the crux of the row that broke out this week. Nadda, defending the Narendra Modi government against the Cockroach Janta Party-led protests that have swept Delhi and other cities, cited the SSB leak as evidence that paper leaks were not unique to BJP-ruled states. Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah shot back on X that Nadda had, in effect, cited the Centre's own record: the leak dated to 2022, two years before Abdullah's National Conference–Congress government took office in 2024, while J&K was under the LG's direct charge.
From one leak to a trail
The JKSSB scandal did not stay contained to a single exam. It forced authorities to cancel not just the sub-inspector recruitment but parallel drives for junior engineers and finance account assistants, after it emerged that the computer-based testing had been outsourced to a Mumbai firm, Aptech Limited, despite the company's history of being blacklisted elsewhere for malpractice.
Investigators then spent much of 2022 and 2023 chasing the fallout: the CBI booked 33 people over the sub-inspector exam alone. The list of those indicted included a JKSSB board member and under-secretary, a former CRPF officer and a Bengaluru-based firm. Seven people were arrested by November 2022 and, separately, a BSF officer named Karnail Singh, later called the case's kingpin, among 24 were eventually charge-sheeted in November 2023.
A parallel CBI operation covered roughly 37 locations in the Jammu division over the finance-accounts exam; a fire-services recruitment scandal and a cyber-fraud bust that saw 23 people arrested for running fake call centres added to the list through the year.
Beyond Recruitment
The trail extended well beyond recruitment as a previous Kashmir Times investigation revealed.
A former IAS officer, Ashok Parmar, went public with allegations of a roughly Rs 13,000 crore scam in the execution of the Jal Jeevan Mission across J&K; the Congress party contended he was being targeted by the administration for speaking out, while the Jal Shakti Department's financial commissioner, Shaleen Kabra, denied any financial irregularity in the scheme.
A larger figure surfaced around the Ayushman Bharat Jan Arogya Yojana. Advocate Sheikh Shakeel Ahmed filed a complaint with the CBI on October 10, 2022, alleging a Rs 500–-00 crore scam in the scheme's implementation. The agency transferred the matter to J&K's Anti-Corruption Bureau in April 2023, and a Jammu court repeatedly extended the ACB's deadline to report progress, most recently to September 30 that year.
In a related insurance-scheme thread, former J&K governor Satya Pal Malik was reported to have been summoned by the CBI in February 2023 for questioning in what was described as a Reliance Insurance scam.
A parallel, hospital-level fraud inquiry under the same scheme found that the state health agency had, in 2022, suspended the empanelment of 13 hospitals and fined 17 others, imposing penalties of more than Rs 1.77 crore, of which over Rs 1.34 crore had been recovered.
The J&K administration pushed back hard on suggestions of a larger loss. At a press conference, health and medical education secretary Bhupinder Kumar said the scheme's then-insurer, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, had collected Rs 304.59 crore in premiums between December 2020 and March 2022 while paying out Rs 398.41 crore in claims, arguing that it amounted to a loss to the insurer, not the exchequer.
He added that since the scheme's launch, the government had paid insurers Rs 1,175.32 crore in total premiums against Rs 1,249.33 crore disbursed in claims to hospitals, benefiting roughly 5.67 lakh patients, with nearly 99 per cent of patients rating their treatment as excellent or good in feedback collected through QR codes and a call centre.
The Kiru Hydro Electric Power Project case kept expanding through repeated rounds of investigation. Former Governor Satya Pal Malik's allegation of a Rs 300 crore bribe offer to clear the roughly Rs 2,200 crore contract led the CBI to search premises linked to Kanwaljeet Singh Duggal of Mainstream IT Solutions Private Limited and one D P Singh across Delhi, Shimla, Noida and Chandigarh in 2023, the fourth such round of raids since the case began.
The agency has separately named former Chenab Valley Power Projects chairman Navin Kumar Chaudhary, three other former officials, and Patel Engineering Limited (the firm ultimately awarded the contract) in its investigation.
And in Jammu's Bishnah area, Crime Branch raids in September 2023 on two advocates and a cyber café, whose owners were identified as Arun Dev Singh and Deepak Jamwal, uncovered what officials called a multi-crore unlocked e-stamp scam, in which editable digital stamp papers were allegedly used to fraudulently register land in beneficiaries' names.
The administration appointed a Registration Department official, Sheikh Arshad Ayub, to investigate, giving him a week to report back.
By the time Abdullah's government took over in October 2024, few of these cases had reached a conclusion - a fact he pointedly invoked when he asked Nadda what had become of the high-powered committee that a Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court order had directed the LG administration to set up to probe the JKSSB's alleged irregularities.
Understand the chronology
Congress's Jairam Ramesh joined the pushback with a chronology argument of his own, aimed at a different institution. Framing Nadda's press conference as a reaction to criticism from Rahul Gandhi rather than a genuine defence, Ramesh invoked a phrase associated with Union home minister Amit Shah "chronology samajhiye" to argue that the National Testing Agency, set up by the Modi government after it dismantled earlier examination systems, had gone on to preside over roughly nine paper leaks, including disruptions to NEET-UG and UGC-NET exams in 2026, despite a 101-point reform plan drawn up after the agency's 2024 failures going largely unimplemented.
He also cited the police response with lathi charges, water cannons and tear gas faced by students protesting the leaks.
Between Abdullah correcting a two-year date discrepancy and Ramesh reaching for a timeline of his own, the row has become as much a dispute over sequencing as over substance.
Meanwhile, the underlying 2022–23 trail of J&K cases still remains without a clear resolution.
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