'Sunny Leone' tops Bihar engineering department list: 'Glad the other me has scored well,' tweets actor; Tejashwi blames Nitish govt

When the Bihar Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) invited applications for the post of a junior civil engineer, little did it think that the online application system would result in a strange prank that would lead Bollywood actor Sunny Leone’s namesake to top the merit list of registered candidates. Not only has the topper’s name elicited responses on social media from the likes of Leone herself and Opposition leader Tejashwi Yadav, the bizarre arrangement of letters that make up the name of the third ranked engineer has also drawn questions on the legitimacy of the PHED ranking system. The third rank in the list is occupied by someone whose name was entered as “bvcxzbnnb” and whose father’s name was listed as “mggvghhnnnn”. The second ranking Nirmal Chakraborty’s father is, oddly, called Om Puri, like the Bollywood actor who died in 2017. “Courtesy to CM Nitish Kumar’s ‘farzi topper banao, farzi naukri pao’ education and recruitment policy, ‘Sunny Leone’ tops Bihar junior engineer merit list with 98.5 marks. Another candidate named, ‘BVCXZBNNB’ has also made it to the top 3rd rank of the list,” Tejashwi tweeted. As many as 18,000 people had applied for about 200 posts in the PHED. For this particular job, applicants were ranked in order of system-generated scores that were automatically arrived at after their engineering diploma marks and experience points were added. “Sunny Leone”, whose father’s name is listed as “Leona Leone”, received 98.5. The actor herself was one to see the hilarity of the situation and tweeted in jest that she was glad an alter ego had done well.

HAHA, Im so glad the OTHER me has scored so well !!!!! lol... https://t.co/dV1RTQTN5J

— Sunny Leone (@SunnyLeone) February 20, 2019

However, there is no confirmation on whether the candidate is genuine, or whether a prankster had made an application, reported Hindustan Times. Ashok Kumar, joint secretary (management) of PHED Bihar, told the newspaper that while they had indeed received the application, verification of the candidate, in fact of all candidates, is pending. “Yes, we received an application for the post with the name Sunny Leone whose father’s name is Leona Leone… But we cannot confirm whether this application is genuine. This can be confirmed only after certificate and document verification is done.” A notice issued by PHED Bihar said that the list was a draft, and candidates can raise objections till 24 February. PHED minister Vinod Narayan Jha told PTI that the department will examine the genuineness of candidates who would have to submit required documents for verification before an interview. The department’s special secretary, Satish Chandra Mishra, told the news agency that he “did not know” who Leone is. “I do not know who is Sunny Leone. But it does sound like a name that might have been uploaded on the website by way of mischief. We will get it sorted out,” he said.   [caption id=“attachment_6125171” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] The draft merit list of the Bihar PHED.[/caption] Bihar is no stranger to exam results controversies. In 2016, the arts topper of the Bihar School Examination Board, Ruby Rai, science topper Saurabh Shrestha and the third-ranking Rahul Kumar of the science stream had all failed to answer basic questions asked by TV journalists in interviews. Rai had famously  said  that political science was a subject on cooking skills.