The manager of the Uttar Pradesh Board examination centre and his son were among the three arrested for running a massive cheating racket in the trans-Yamuna area of Prayagraj district. The Special Task Force (STF) that arrested the three on Sunday, also recovered three mobile phones, some cash, screenshots of five WhatsApp chats and numerous solved answer sheets.
The accused were identified as Indrabhan Singh, Ashish Singh and Vikas Yadav, all residents of Meja. As per the police investigation, they used to charge Rs 4,000 from each candidate to provide a solved question paper. Indrabhan Singh was the principal and centre manager of the examination centre, his son Ashish was a computer teacher and Vikas was a solver.
So, how did the cheating racket function? A team of 'test solvers' worked on stamped answer sheets, which would be later added to the answer sheets of students or simply submitted as their own answer sheets after the examination got over.
The father-son duo told the police that they used to send question papers of Class 12 board exams to solvers through WhatsApp. Then would charge candidates around Rs 35,000 to Rs 40,000 to provide copies of solved question papers of all the subjects.
Additional Superintendent of Police (STF) Neeraj Kumar Pandey said, "We were tipped off about a gang of three running a copying racket in Meja. An STF team conducted a series of raids and nabbed the three accused."
The ASP said that the accused had planned to submit the solved answer sheets of Mathematics of class 12 on Saturday, once the examination was over.
The SP said that Vikas was arrested while he was solving questions of class 12 Mathematics examination near a brick kiln on Saturday afternoon.
During interrogation, Vikas told the police that he had to deliver the solved copies to Indrabhan Singh, who was the principal and centre manager of the Mata Deen Singh Inter College. Based on the statement given by Vikas, STF nabbed Indrabhan Singh and his son.
An estimated 56 lakh students are taking the UP board's Class 10 and 12 exams. The state government has set up a monitoring unit and the exam centres have CCTV camera coverage. The Uttar Pradesh Secondary Education Board (UPSEB) has identified 938 centres as "sensitive" and 395 as "hyper-sensitive", suggesting that these centres are vulnerable to such practices.
