One student in Jharkhand got maths paper a day before exam

CHATRA: : Jharkhand Police have arrested a Mathematics teacher of a coaching institute and two owners of the same institute in Chatra for allegedly selling the Class 10 CBSE maths paper to students for Rs 500 to Rs 5,000.

After solving the questions, the maths teacher, Amesh, and the two owners of the institute – Satish Pandey and Pankaj Singh — distributed the questions among other students.

Police said that at least nine students have been apprehended and produced before the Juvenile Justice Board.

Police have also seized handwritten documents in which Amesh, who goes by one name, had solved the questions.

“The question paper sent through Whatsapp was handwritten and had the questions in the same sequence as they appeared on the examination day,” Chatra superintendent of police Akhilesh B Verior said.

The student who received the question paper took the help of a mathematics teacher Amesh to solve it. Amesh works with a private coaching institute named Study Vision.

“We have not been able to establish any Delhi link in the mathematics paper leak. The electronic surveillance, however, has established that two students from Bihar were involved in the transfer of the question papers to Jharkhand,” Verior said.

On Friday, after Anil Swarup, secretary, school education, human resource development (HRD) ministry, had said in New Delhi that preliminary investigations had revealed the leak of the Class 10 paper was restricted to Delhi, NCR, and Haryana, and that there was no evidence that it was a pan-india phenomenon.

The Jharkhand police that they came to know that a student in the state’s Chatra district received the CBSE Class 10 mathematics question paper on Whatsapp from a student in Bihar on March 27 – a day before the examination. The police claimed that at least two students from Bihar were involved in circulating the leaked paper in Jharkhand.

Two of the arrested accused —Pankaj Singh and Satish Pandey — had also allegedly helped students cheat in science and social studies papers in Chatra, police said.

The duo allegedly asked students to click pictures of the questions and send them through Whatsapp from toilets of their exam centres and they would send the answers as reply.

The Jharkhand police swung into action after principal of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Chatra lodged a complaint with the Sadar police station, alleging that some students had used unfair means with the help of a few unidentified persons.

A six-member Special Investigation Team (SIT) which unraveled the paper leak story so far in Chatra is still probing the matter.