Change in name and disabilityIn 2019, when she appeared in the UPSC exam, she gave her name as Khedkar Puja Diliprao and stood 11,244th in the rank list. Two years later, she took the name of Puja Manorama Dilip Khedkar and claimed her eligibility for two quotas — OBC and PwBD 1 (person with benchmark disability). PwBD 1 stands for a person with not less than 40% disability. Her certificate claimed she has poor eyesight.PwBD candidates of the general/OBC/EWS categories are allowed a maximum of nine attempts while SC/ST PwBD candidates get unlimited attempts in case they are otherwise eligible. The upper age limit for taking an exam, too, is relaxable up to a maximum of 10 years. The maximum attempts in the general/EWS category is six with age cap of 32, for OBCs nine and age ceiling of 35, and for SC/STs unlimited till 37 years of age.Within two years, Puja got her certificate changed from PwBD single disability to multiple disability, adding mental illness and 7% damage in a knee.Multiple disabilities are quite rare, so such candidates are few in number. That gave her an IAS posting though her All India Rank in the 2022 UPSC exam was 821. Each year, the IAS intake is less than 200.As per the UPSC’s notification for civil services, there are five categories of persons with benchmark disabilities. The first one is blindness and low vision; the second is deaf and hard hearing; the third one is locomotor disability, including cerebral palsy, cured leprosy and dwarfism dystrophy, the fourth is autism, intellectual disability, specific learning disability, and mental illness; while the fifth includes multiple disabilities, which can be a mixture of any of the four categories like deaf-blind.In 2007, Puja’s certificates said she was mentally and physically fit for admission to Pune’s Kashibai Navale Medical College. Later she claimed disability and to get those certificates, she used multiple residential addresses, one of which included her mother Manorama’s factory, which is illegal as per law. This factory was demolished by the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation because it has not paid taxes for the last two years.
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