40,000 Class X Answer Sheets Go Missing From Bihar's Government School

The fate of thousands of matriculation examinees hangs in the balance as over 40,000 answer sheets of Class X examination conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) are missing from the evaluation centre at SS Girl¡¯s Senior Secondary School in Gopalganj.

The BSEB on Tuesday said the results would now be declared at 11.30am on June 26, instead of Wednesday as was announced earlier.

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School principal Pramod Kumar Shrivastava, who was summoned to the board headquarters on Tuesday, has been detained for interrogation, Patna SSP Manu Maharaj said. The matter was reported when BSEB officials Sujeet Kumar and Pradeep Kumar, who reached the Gopalganj school on Saturday to collect some answer sheets of top rank holders for verification, could not find the papers at the centre.

The principal said on getting information from the BSEB officials, he rushed to the school from his hometown Padrauna in UP and lodged an FIR at Gopalganj town police station on Sunday. ¡°The officials wanted the answer sheets of science, social science, Hindi, English, Sanskrit and mathematics of two students. We could find a few answer copies only. After thorough search, we found several bags of answer copies missing from the strong room where these had been kept on April 5 after evaluation. Apart from me, only caretaker Chattu Singh has the key of the strong room,¡± Shrivastava said in his FIR.

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¡°We are questioning the school staff. There was no sign of forced entry into the strong room¡± Town SHO Ravi Kumar told this newspaper. He said Shrivastava informed him that around 214 bags of around 40,000 evaluated answer copies were missing. The school has total 21 employees, but police have so far failed to nab any of the culprits.

BSEB chairman Anand Kishor and secretary Anup Kumar Sinha neither responded to the call nor replied to the text messages sent to their cellphone numbers. However, a BSEB statement issued on Tuesday said the missing answer copies would not affect the results as the copies were stored in the strong room after evaluation and marks had already been awarded to the examinees in the award sheets. The board also ensured that it would not affect the results of top ten rank holders. ¡°The BSEB has asked Gopalganj DM and SP to investigate the matter and take strict action against the culprits,¡± the statement reads.

Meanwhile, opposition RJD attacked the state government on the issue. Taking a swipe at CM Nitish Kumar, leader of opposition and former deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav tweeted that the ¡°pro-Nitish officials of the BSEB, notorious for education scandal, corruption and misdeeds¡±, came to know only today that 42,000 answer sheets of the class X were missing when they had to declare the results on June 20.