Janjivan Bureau / 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 Rs 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 initially believed the whole thing was a mischief to create rumours. “They thought someone wanted the coaching centre owner to be framed,” said the investigator.
