Bhubaneswar: The vice-president of the Odisha Board of Secondary Education was arrested on Sunday, ten days after the Odisha Teacher Eligibility Test (OTET) was cancelled due to a leaked handwritten question paper that went viral on social media, affecting nearly 75,000 candidates.
Nihar Ranjan Mohanty, vice-president of the Board of Secondary Education (BSE), was involved in setting the OTET question papers and was coordinating with a Bhopal-based firm that printed the papers, state crime investigation department (CID) chief Vinaytosh Mishra said.
“But before the question papers went for printing, the firm had sent a password-protected copy of the paper to Mohanty for proofreading. Mohanty was supposed to download and delete the file after proofreading. However, he allowed Jitan Moharana, a data entry operator working in the office of the controller of examinations, to access his laptop who leaked the papers,” Mishra said.
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So far, seven others, including a teacher, have been arrested in connection with the paper leak.
{{/usCountry}}So far, seven others, including a teacher, have been arrested in connection with the paper leak.
{{/usCountry}}The CID found the proofread copy on Mohanty’s laptop, which led to his interrogation. Over 100 telephone calls between Mohanty and Moharana over the past three months, outside of office hours, were found in the call logs.
Mohanty, who has been overseeing examinations for the past 11 years, was arrested based on evidence collected.
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Moharana and five others were arrested on July 30, following which a teacher was nabbed. Moharana had access to the vice-president’s laptop and obtained the question paper using a pen drive. He then shared it with the working president of the State Ex-cadre Teachers’ Association and its Koraput unit head, who sold the paper to three brokers for ₹2.5 lakh.
The BSE conducts final examinations for various state-sponsored courses, including Class X board exams, OTET, Odisha Secondary School Teacher Eligibility Test (OSSTET), Teachers’ Certificate (CT) examination, Certificate Course in Physical Education Examination (CPEd), and the Prathama and Madhyama examinations.