Jaipur: Rajasthan police arrested five people trying to cheat in highly competitive Rajasthan Eligibility Examination for Teachers or REET on Sunday. The candidates were found wearing chappals with Bluetooth devices fitted inside the sole in an important exam for selecting teachers for Government schools in Rajasthan, said officials.

The first person was caught cheating in Ajmer and the police soon found an entire cheating racket across the state involving candidates in the highly competitive REET. Similar chappals have been found with Bluetooth and mobile devices in Bikaner and Sikar.

According to the police officer Ratan Lal Bhargav, the chappal is such it has an entire phone inside and a Bluetooth device. The candidate had a device inside his ear and someone from outside the exam hall was helping him cheat. The police are still unraveling this elaborate cheating plot, which appears to be a small scale industry in itself. According to the sources the cheating chappals were cleverly manufactured and some reports suggest could have been sold to candidates with the hardware for cheating for as much as ₹ 2 lakh.

We immediately alerted other districts as well. In the next phase of the exam, nobody can go in with slippers, shoes or socks into the exam centre, said Ajmer police officer Jagdish Chandra Sharma. Mobile internet and SMS were snapped in several districts of Rajasthan for 12 hours today to prevent cheating in the REET. Some 16 lakh students took the test for 31,000 posts in Government schools. Given the large number of candidate scheduled to take the REET, the State Government made elaborate arrangements for security and travel with precautions amid the Covid – 19 pandemic.