Missing Bihar Class 10 answer sheets mystery solved! Copies sold for this amount

Bihar police arrested a scrap dealer on Saturday in Gopalganj town after finding one of the 42,400 missing class 10th answer sheets of Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) exams. The answer sheets belonging to students of Nawada district went missing from the evaluation centre at SS Girls High School of Gopalganj.

The Indian Express has reported that the arrested scrap dealer informed police that he bought all papers from an office attendant of the school, who has already been arrested. He also informed police that it might be difficult to recover answer sheets as he had sold most part of the whole lot to a wholesale scrap dealer of the area. Rashid Zama, Superintendent of Police, Gopalganj told IE, “We conducted raids at local scrap dealer Pappu Gupta’s shop and recovered one answer sheet. Gupta said he had purchased answer sheets in bulk from SS Girls School’s office attendant Chhatu Singh. He said he has been buying scrap from the school since 2014.” Previously on June 20, Patna High Court had served a notice to the Bihar government on the missing answer sheets.

Apart from the scrap dealer and the office attendant of SS Girls High School, an auto-rickshaw driver who brought the answer sheets from the school to the scrap dealer’s shop and the night guard of the school have also been arrested, informed the SP. The police are even reportedly going around questioning ragpickers, who collect scraps from the area adjacent to the school. Earlier the police have also found around 200 empty bags from the backyard of SS Girls High School, in which the answer sheets might have been kept.

ANI reported today that the 42,500 answer sheets of Class 10th Bihar board exams, missing from Gopalganj’s SS Inter College, were sold to a scrap vendor Pappu Kumar Gupta for Rs 8,500. Scrap vendor, and auto driver Sanjay Kumar who transported the copies in his auto, have been arrested.

“They regularly buy books and other scrap from the college (SS Inter College from where answer sheets went missing). It is fine if they bought it with the same purpose, but we are investigating if they had any other intention,” Gopal Ganj SP told the news agency.

The BSEB has announced that the entire answer sheet fiasco, will not have any effect on the Board results that is scheduled to be declared on June 26, as the marks were received by the board soon after the copies were evaluated. However, they have admitted that the board would face problems if a candidate whose answer sheets went missing seeks for a scrutiny of his or her papers.

Courtesy: FE Online