With sleuths of the Special Task Force busy with investigation for a crackdown on the racket involving leakage of papers of the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test (UPTET) 2021, the state government is yet to come out with a new date to conduct the exam.
On Monday morning, sources said that the government decided to conduct the exams on December 26 but within hours, the government came out with a denial claiming that no date was finalised till now.
Additional Chief Secretary, Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Board (UPBEB), Deepak Kumar, disclosed that they had yet to take a decision on the next date for conducting the UPTET exam.
As many as 19,99,418 candidates had registered for the UPTET on November 28 but the government had to cancel the exam after the question paper was found floating on WhatsApp groups in several districts hours before the exams started on Sunday. The UP government later said that the UPTET 2021 would be conducted in a month in a “transparent manner”.
Candidates would not be charged any additional exam fee. Besides, they would be provided free travel facilities by the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (UPSRTC), UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said. He also asked police to invoke National Security Act (NSA) and Gangsters Act against those involved in the paper leakage.
The Uttar Pradesh Basic Education Board (UPBEB), the exam conducting body, is expected to issue fresh admit cards for the candidates along with details of the new exam date, time, and venue. The questions will be in multiple-choice questions (MCQs) format and will be held in Hindi and English. Candidates can choose the language at their convenience. The time allotted to the candidates for the UPTET exam is two and half hours or 150 minutes.
Meanwhile, the Special Task Force (STF), which so far arrested 30 people in connection with the paper leak, claimed to be grilling several others to make a crackdown on the entire gang involved in the paper leakage.
ADG (STF) Amitabh Yash confirmed 30 arrests so far and said further investigations were on.
The arrests were made from different cities including Lucknow, Meerut, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Kaushambi and Prayagraj. Of the 30 arrests, 16 were made from Prayagraj. They include Satya Prakash Singh, an assistant teacher at a primary school in the city's Shankargarh area. When searched, he was found to have the solved question paper in his WhatsApp.
Rajendra Patel, the alleged mastermind of the whole racket, and Chaturbhuj Singh, one of the key players, were also among those arrested from Prayagraj, according to the government statement. Besides, police arrested other members of the gang, including one Sunny Singh, who was instrumental in sourcing solvers from Bihar, the statement said.
Four persons were arrested from Lucknow district and one each from Kaushambi, Ayodhya, and Ambedkarnagar. Three persons were arrested from Shamli district. These three had procured 10 copies of the question paper for Rs 5 lakh and had taken Rs 50,000 each from 50-60 candidates to give them access to the papers for reading and memorising.
According to the police, Roshan Singh Patel, arrested from Kaushambi, had leaked the paper of the first shift of TET. Manish, Ravi and Dharmendra, who were caught from Meerut, leaked the paper of the second shift. The police recovered the first shift paper from Roshan Singh Patel, a resident of Chitrakoot. Patel is a lab technician in Manjhanpur tehsil of Chitrakoot.
According to STF, this paper was provided to Roshan Patel by someone in Lucknow and he was going to Kaushambi when he was nabbed. Search is on for the rest of the members of the gang, the government said.
From the arrested persons, photocopies of the question papers, mobile phones, pen drives, notes and other items were recovered, the UP government said.
Sources said that the STF also picked up over three dozen suspects and were grilling them in this connection.
