Several students protested outside the BAPU Exam Centre in Patna, alleging that the exam’s sanctity has been compromised. The district magistrate of Bihar’s Patna, Chandrashekhar Singh, on Friday was caught on camera slapping a Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) aspirant, who was protesting outside an examination centre in the city.
The combined (preliminary) competitive examination of the BPSC was held on Friday to recruit people in Group A and B posts. About five lakh candidates appeared for the exam across 945 centres in the state. However, several students began protesting outside the BAPU Exam Centre in Patna, alleging that the exam’s sanctity has been compromised.A video showed Chandrashekhar Singh slapping a man amid police deployment and seemingly chasing away the protesters from the spot. They alleged that the question paper of the examination was leaked and that there was mismanagement at the centre, including a delay in the distribution of question papers.
“Half of the students did not even get the OMR sheet or the question booklet for 15 minutes…. Many got the question booklet one hour late and it was snatched away in 10 minutes… Where the capacity of students is more than 200, why only 175 question papers were brought?… We discovered that the question paper has been leaked… Teachers were threatening us to stay quiet…” a protesting student told.
“There is not one BPSC exam which has not been rigged… The seal of the question booklet packet was torn… An aspirants answered sheet was found in the toilet…” the student added.
BPSC chairman refutes allegation
However, BPSC chairman Ravi Manu Bhai S Parmar refuted allegations of paper leak and said that no complaints regarding examinations have surfaced.
“There has not been even one complaint from any of the 912 centres across the state. At one centre in Patna, some students did raise questions about the change in pattern, but their confusion was also addressed that there was nothing like that,” he said. “The reports we have got is that the exams went off smoothly. The students had to enter the exam centre an hour before the exam, and once the exam started, they had no access to what was happening outside, as they didn’t have mobile phones. It is all mischief in the era of social media,” he added.
