The 41-year-old Vaidya, a resident of Nirmala Apartments in Tilak Nagar, was arrested around 1.30 pm and later produced in the court of Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC), Govind Masand. The court has remanded him to police custody till October 14.

The police had been questioning Vaidya over the seizure of as many as 49,000 "blank, printed and pre-signed marksheets" of various courses including engineering, law (LL.B), education (B.Ed) and social welfare (B.SW), from the RKNEC office more than a month ago.

According to sources, as the NU remains short of requisite infrastructure to facilitate smooth process of spot-valuation, it has been entrusting the task with private colleges forthe past several years. The spot-valuation of engineering answer sheets for exams held during academic session 1997-98 was held at RKNEC. Vaidya himself was directly associated with the process by virtue of being the college principal.

Talking to The Indian Express, a senior police officer said that despite repeated queries Vaidya was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the presence of such a sizable number of "blank, printed and pre-signed marksheets" not only of engineering but also of other courses in his college. "Ultimately, we decided to arrest him to further our probe," he added.

Police investigations, on previous occasion, had revealed a major lacuna in the functioning of NU exams department in context with distribution of such marksheets. Nowhere did the authorities maintain any record of the number of copies forwarded to the institution taking care of the spot-valuation process.

Even in the present case, investigators were told that only 8,000 blank, printed and pre-signedmarksheets were available with the RKNEC contrary to the actual finding that led to recovery of 49,000 such sheets.

At the time of seizure of these blank marksheets, the police had arrested Arun Nagose, a peon with the RKNEC. Nagose was suspected of stealing some of these marksheets and selling the same for a price to two of the scam accused Gopal Thakur and Prasad Anna.

Vaidya is the fifth major catch by the police ever since the probe into the scandal commenced in a right earnest in June following the arrest of the then Assistant Registrar (Professional Exams) Yadav Kohchade.

In between, officiating Registrar and Controller of Exams Prakash Badribabu Mistri, Dean of Engineering Faculty and Vice-Principal of Yashwantrao Chavan College of Engineering (YCCE) Hemant Omkar Thakre and Assistant Registrar (Revaluation) Sham Kalamkar were held. Mistri, Kohchade and Thakre are currently out on conditional bail.