A police team on Saturday recovered all the missing 42,400 answer sheets of the Class X examination 2018 from the shop of a scrap dealer in Gopalgunj. The theft of these evaluated answer sheets from the strong room of the SS Girls’ Senior Secondary School was detected only two days before the declaration of the results of the Matric exam. The answer sheets belonged to Nawada district.
The Special Investigation Team after two days of the raids detected the answer sheets in a scrap dealer’s shop at Hajirapur village on the outskirts of Gopagunj town where the shop owner revealed that it were sold by the school peon Chhattu Singh and he purchased it for Rs 8,500. The team arrested the shop owner and one staff and produced them before a sessions court.
Earlier the principal of the school Pramod Kumar Srivastava was detained by police when he was summoned to the office of the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) on Tuesday. Peon Chhattu Singh was also arrested as he kept the extra keys of the strong room. The missing case of the answer sheets was not reported to police by the school authorities till the matter was detected by the BSEB officials.
The BSEB had extended the date for declaration of the results from June 20 to 26 as a result of this incident even though BSEB chairman Anand Kishore claimed that the missing of the answer sheets would not affect the result as the answer sheets were already evaluated and marks had been tabulated and reported on mark sheets.
The missing of the Class X exam answer sheets from the school strong room once again brought taint to the reputation of the BSEB which was getting bad name for the past three years for questionable results and declaring such candidates toppers who lacked merit and did not know about the subjects in which they topped.
The missing of the answer sheets came to light when the two BSEB officials from Patna went to the Gopalgunj school to collect some answer copies of top rank holders for verification but they failed to find the papers at the evaluation centre. School Principal Srivastava who lived in Padrauna in UP rushed to Gopalgunj on getting the information and reported the matter to police. Gopalgunj police said there was no sign of forced entry in the strong room from where 214 bags containing the answer copies were missing. These copies after evaluation had been kept in bags and stored in the strong room on April 5.