40,000 answer sheets of Class X missing in Bihar

With over 40,000 answer sheets “found missing” from the evaluation centre at SS Girl’s Senior Secondary School in Gopalganj, the fate of thousands of Class X board examinees in Bihar now hangs in the balance.

School principal Pramod Kumar Shrivastava, who was summoned to the BSEB headquarters on Tuesday, has been detained for interrogation, said Patna SSP Manu Maharaj. Following this, the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) on Tuesday said the results would be declared on June 26, instead of Wednesday.

The matter was reported when BSEB officials Sujeet Kumar and Pradeep Kumar, who reached the school on Saturday to collect answer sheets of two top rank-holders for verification, could not find the papers at the centre.

The principal said, on receiving this information from 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 copies of science, social science, Hindi, English, Sanskrit and mathematics of two students. We could find a few answer copies only. After a thorough search, we found several bags of answer copies missing from the strong room where they had been kept on April 5 after evaluation. Apart from me, only caretaker Chattu Singh has the key,” Shrivastava said in his FIR. Police have so far failed to nab any of the culprits.

The school has 21employees. “We are questioning the school staff. There was no sign of forced entry into the strong room,” Town SHO Ravi Kumar told TOI.

The SHO said Shrivastava informed him that around 214 bags of around 40,000 evaluated answer sheets were missing. BSEB chairman Anand Kishor and secretary Anup Kumar Sinha neither responded to calls nor replied to text messages sent to their cellphone numbers. However, a BSEB statement issued on Tuesday said that the missing answer sheets would not affect the results as the copies were stored in the strong room after evaluation.