42,000 Bihar Board answer sheets recovered from scrap dealer

Jitendra K Shrivastava
Tribune News Service
Patna, June 24

Police have found more than 42,000 answer sheets of Bihar School Examination Board’s Class 10 examinations at a scrap shop in Gopalganj.

Results of Bihar school board’s Class 10 examinations have yet to be announced.

Police arrested four people on Saturday on charges of selling off 42,500 answer sheets kept in a room at SS Girls’ Senior Secondary School, Gopalganj.

Chotu Singh, a peon at the school, is believed to have sold them off to scrap dealer Papu Kumar Gupta for Rs 8,500 last week.

Police have arrested Singh, Gupta, Sanjay Kumar— an autorickshaw driver who helped transport the answer sheets to the dealer— and a night guard, Aspujan Singh.

Gupta regularly traded scrapes at the school.

Sanjay Kumar is believed to have told investigators he carted off the answer sheets to sell to Gupta 18 days ago.

Gopalganj superintendent of police (SP) Rashid Zaman said: “We have yet to investigate if there are other people involved in the case,” he said.

Following the reports in local Hindi dailies last week that 42,000 copies of answer sheets had gone missing from SS Balika Inter School in Gopalganj, an FIR was filed and school Principal was detained and interrogated by the police.

The Patna High Court has taken cognisance of reports and asked the state government to come up with an explanation within a month.

Around 17.7 lakh students have appeared for the BSEB 2018 10th class exam.

In 2017, just half of the students (50.12 per cent) had managed to clear the 10th class exam. With IANS