The CBI on Wednesday conducted searches at 26 locations spread across 6 States at the premises of officials working in the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), ex-officials of NIOS, study centres and private persons in an on-going investigation of a case relating to large-scale bungling in the conduct of Class X and Class XII examinations.
The searches were conducted at Bhopal, Sehore, Ratlam, Umaria (all in Madhya Pradesh); in New Delhi; Fatehabad and Faridabad (Haryana); Bhubaneswar and Ganjam (Odisha); Guwahati, Kamrup and Lakhimpur (Assam) and Gangtok (Sikkim)
"During searches, around 200 items such as hard disk drives, mobile phones and various incriminating documents including admit cards, vouchers, passbooks, mark sheets, cheque books, seals, diaries, answer sheets of NIOS, payments received from candidates, fees payment made to NIOS and seating plan of examination hall among others were recovered, a CBI spokesperson said.
CBI had registered the case on July 23 this year under various Sections of the Indian Penal Code including criminal conspiracy and cheating among others besides provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The case was registered on the complaint of Ministry of Human Resource Development on the allegations that there was malpractices in the conduct of examination with respect to large number of students (around 1800) in the class X and XII examinations, conducted by National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) in April, 2017.