The Central Board of Secondary Education sent an “extremely confidential” set of instructions to its examination centre superintendents on Saturday evening, telling them it will email a link to the question papers, a system it tested on Thursday.
It also instructed schools to ensure they can print over 2,000 sheets of paper between 7.15 am, when the email will be sent, and 10.15 am on Monday, when Class 10 students are set to write Sanskrit paper and Class 12 students Hindi Core paper.
To ensure there are no glitches in at least the delivery of the papers, the CBSE has instructed exam centres to organise high-speed internet and even dongles as backup. It has asked them to hire generators as well.
The board, dealing with actual and rumoured leak of papers over the past week, has also demanded that the centres take measures for security such as installing close circuit television cameras in the room where the papers are printed.
These instructions have at least some government schools housing the exam centres in Delhi worried. A senior Delhi government official told Scroll.in that these schools do not have the wherewithal to print enough question papers on time.
“I have one printer and that heats up after 50 pages of printing,” a government school principal said. “We will also have to separate the sheets into three sets – each question paper is about six to eight pages – and staple them. We need to make sure questions are not mixed up.”
Delhi schools have got generators for their information and communication technology laboratories but many are not functional, the principal noted. Not all schools have cameras where they keep their printers either.
The principal also wondered if the website hosting the papers would be able to handle the traffic of every exam centre logging in to download them.
Meanwhile, supervisors and other officials who were earlier responsible for fetching question papers from bank vaults were made to visit the banks on Saturday and see how it is done.
Schools are expected to make all these arrangements over the weekend.
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