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The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) has accused the TDP-led Andhra Pradesh government of censorship, alleging that several of its social media posts on the District Selection Committee (DSC) recruitment scam have been removed by the state through the Sahyog portal.
According to the Opposition party, posts on Facebook and Instagram, including those published by Sakshi TV, the party’s mouthpiece, have been taken down. The YSRCP has alleged that the government is using the expanded online content-removal mechanism to suppress criticism of alleged irregularities in the state’s Mega DSC recruitment process.
What is the DSC scam?
Large-scale irregularities have been alleged in the recruitment process of teachers through the Mega DSC examination. While the TDP government had promised 25,000 teacher posts, the recruitment was eventually conducted for 16,347 posts. Nearly three lakh candidates appeared for the examination. According to the YSRCP, the examination paper was leaked.
YSRCP chief and Opposition leader YS Jagan Mohan Reddy has pointed to the case of an employee of the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), the body entrusted with preparing the question papers, who allegedly secured the first rank in the examination.
Jagan has described the employee’s rank as a “classic example” of the irregularities in the recruitment process. He has also alleged that the Chandrababu Naidu government sidelined the DSC Convenor and entrusted both the preparation of question papers and other crucial responsibilities to the SCERT Director, undermining the transparency of the examination and creating conditions that enabled irregularities.
Jagan has questioned why the SCERT employee was not appointed despite securing the first rank, why his identification details and data were subsequently removed from the merit list, and why he was not called for certificate verification. He has said the employee raised these issues before the court.
According to Jagan, the fact that an outsourcing employee working in SCERT and allegedly involved in the preparation of question papers secured the first rank raises serious questions about the integrity of the examination and supports his allegation of a paper leak.
Jagan has demanded a CBI inquiry into the alleged paper leak and irregularities in the recruitment process.
The removal of the YSRCP’s social media posts comes amid growing scrutiny of the government’s powers to seek takedowns of online content. The Sahyog portal, operated by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), enables authorised government agencies, including state authorities and law enforcement agencies, to send content-removal requests to social media platforms.
Under the amended Information Technology Rules, intermediaries are required to remove unlawful content after receiving a valid and reasoned intimation from an appropriate government or its authorised agency, or a court order. These new rules empower police to seek removal of online content without prior judicial scrutiny.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has complied with government content-removal requests in India, leading to removal of content without providing an opportunity to the user to contest such orders. Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), has taken a more confrontational approach and challenged the government’s takedown mechanism in court. Its challenge to the Sahyog portal was dismissed by the Karnataka High Court in 2025, but the company has continued to contest the broader content-removal framework.
