A Special Investigation Team of the Bihar Police on Saturday arrested two more people in connection with the missing 42,000 answer sheets of the Class 10 exams conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board, The New Indian Express reported. The team recovered five answer sheets, which had gone missing from the SS Balika Inter School in Gopalganj, from a scrap dealer’s shop.
The police have arrested scrap dealer Pappu Gupta, who purchased the sheets, and an autorickshaw driver named Sanjay Kumar, who transported them from the evaluation centre in Gopalganj to Gupta’s shop. Chhatu Singh, an office attendant at the school, was arrested on June 19.
“The scrap dealer has admitted to having purchased the answer sheets for Rs 8,500,” Gopalganj Superintendent of Police Rashid Zaman told The New Indian Express. “This happened in the first week of this month.”
Gupta also told the police that it might be difficult to recover the rest of the sheets since he had sold them to a wholesale scrap dealer, The Indian Express reported. The police had also questioned a few rag-pickers who were seen moving around the school area, Zaman said.
The Bihar education board has said the missing answer sheets will have no bearing on the examination results since it had received the marks soon after evaluation.
On June 19, the school administration filed a First Information about the missing answer sheets, forcing the Bihar School Examination Board to postpone the announcement of the results to June 26. The following day, the Patna High Court served a notice to the state government.
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