Rumour to reality: How leak surfaced in just 13 days
NEW DELHI: The first murmurs about the leak of a CBSE exam paper began when the police control room in Rohini received a phone call about the Class 12 accountancy paper being leaked on March 13, two days before the subject’s examination.
The caller told the police that his tuition friend had offered to sell him the question paper for ₹4,000. Rajneesh Gupta, deputy commissioner of police (Rohini), said that efforts to track the caller failed as he switched off his mobile and the address given for his SIM card verification was incomplete. The complaint was shelved without much probe.
When pictures of 10 pages of the accounts paper were allegedly circulated on Whatsapp, minutes before the exam was to begin on March 15, it sent authorities in a huddle. The photos being circulated were eerily similar to the questions in set 2 of the accounts paper. A tweet by Delhi’s education minister Manish Sisodia appeared to confirm the leak. But by late afternoon that day, the CBSE dismissed the possibility of a leak saying the seals on all question papers were found to be intact.
So, when the CBSE received an unusual fax at 4.22pm on March 23, they first believed it to be a mischief, police said. The fax, from an “unknown” source, informed that a tuition centre owner in central Delhi’s Rajendra Nagar was involved in the paper leak. The fax sender named two schools in Rajendra Nagar who were involved in the crime.
The complaint was forwarded to the CBSE’S regional office the next day. The regional office in turn passed on the complaint to a police inspector through Whatsapp, CBSE’S regional director told police in his statement.
On being asked why the CBSE did not pursue the case with police more proactively, RP Upadhyay, special commissioner of police (crime), said they had been sharing “inputs with the police from time to time”.
“CBSE has been helping us with the probe,” said Upadhyay.
But another senior investigator said the CBSE officials ini- tially believed the whole thing was a mischief to create rumours. “They thought someone wanted the coaching centre owner to be framed,” said the investigator.
Meanwhile, students in Delhi begun receiving their CBSE Class 12 economics question paper a day before the exam on March 26.
Among the first to bring the alleged leak to public knowledge was Ravindra Nath Jha, a man who on his Twitter bio says that he “loves teaching economics”. Drawing attention of authorities, Jha began tweeting images of the economics question paper at 10.21am on March 26. HT tried to contact Nath for more details, but got no response.
The same day at 6pm, an unaddressed envelope was received at the CBSE Academic Unit in Delhi’s Rouse Avenue. According to CBSE’S statement, the envelope contained pages of hand-written answers to that day’s economics paper. The handwritten answers prompted the CBSE to approach the Delhi Police the next day, March 27. The Delhi Police’s crime branch quickly registered an FIR under three Indian Penal Code sections: criminal breach of trust, cheating, criminal conspiracy. The coaching centre owner was picked up for questioning.
Even as the police questioned the man, some other tuition centre owners and several students alleged that the CBSE Class 10 maths paper too had been allegedly leaked, a day before the exam on March 28. A Twitter account that shares Cbse-related issues posted four hand-written pages of the maths question paper at 11.30pm on March 27, over 10 hours before the exam began.
This Twitter account too caught the attention of the authorities, especially when the maths questions the next day was found to be the same as those that had been previously shared. By afternoon of March 28, the CBSE had approached the police with another complaint about the maths paper leak and a separate FIR was registered.
According to Upadhyay, it has been established that both the papers were leaked at least one day before the exams were conducted. The investigators have so far questioned 34 persons.