Bihar candidate’s admit card with Telugu female actor’s photo goes viral

Kumar said he had registered a complaint with the board last year for inserting the female actor’s photograph in his admit card and also sought photo correction in January last year, however, it was clear that it didn’t work.

The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) is being ridiculed on social media for issuing a male candidate a score sheet with the picture of a south Indian female actor while also battling allegations of irregularities in the Secondary Teachers’ Eligibility Test (STET) merit list.

Telugu and Malayalam actress Anupama Parameswaran’s photograph on the admit card of a candidate who cleared teachers recruitment examination is going viral. (Courtesy- YoutTube video grab)

A Jehanabad based candidate Rishikesh Kumar was declared qualified in the teachers’ recruitment examination but excluded from the merit list like hundreds of other candidates, who have questioned the board’s criteria for compiling the merit list, leaving out successful candidates. The apparent irregularity in the merit list is not Kumar’s only problem, he was also issued a result sheet attached with a photograph of Telugu and Malayalam actress Anupama Parameswaran, making the social media go crazy over the state education department’s carelessness.

BSEB released STET 2019 results for recruitment of 12 subjects’ teachers on March 12 and pending results for three subjects’ teachers of Urdu, Sanskrit and Social Science on June 21.

Kumar said he had registered a complaint with the board last year for inserting the female actor’s photograph in his admit card and also sought photo correction in January last year, however, it was clear that it didn’t work. When approached by HT, he refused to talk on the issue.

A senior BSEB official said, “We are looking into the matter. It seems the error was committed by the computer operator.”

When asked how the student made through verification and frisking at the exam centre with a wrong photograph on the admit card, the official said, “The board instructs all candidates to carry their photo-attached identity proof like Aadhar card, driving licence, bank passbook, passport etc at exam centres. In case of any mistake or mismatch, we allow students to take the exam after verifying their details.”

Despite several attempts, BSEB’s chairman Anand Kishor could not be reached for comment on this issue.

247,000 students took the STET 2019 exam across 317 exam centres on January 28 last year after a gap of nearly eight years for recruitment to 37,000 secondary and senior secondary teachers’ posts across the state. However, the exam was declared void in May following paper leak and re-examination was conducted in September through online mode.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday took a jibe at Nitish Kumar government on twitter.

“After Sunny Leone topped in the junior engineering exam, now Anupama Parameswaran has passed the state STET exam. With scam in every exam and recruitment process, Nitish ji is destroying the future of millions of youth. He takes one decade to complete one recruitment process that is too riddled with scam” he tweeted, referring to the 2019 incident when Bollywood actor Sunny Leone was incorrectly named the topper in the draft merit list for the post of junior engineers, released by Bihar Public Health Engineering Department (PHED).