Retest for the 'leak'
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: March 10, 2014 -

Following confirmation of the Hueiyen Lanpao's expose on the leakage of Physics question paper for All India Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (AISSCE), 2014 conducted by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on March 5, the Board has cancelled the examination held in the centres situated in the State of Manipur and ordered re-examination on April 2 next citing 'administrative reasons'.

Why there has to re-examination only in Manipur when the leaked question paper had also been uploaded through the website of Hueiyen Lanpao and shared the same on other social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter, etc ? This is one question that students and their parents are asking today.

Even an on-line petition campaign through change.org has been launched to exert pressure on the Examination Controller of CBSE for an all-India re-examination of leaked Physics paper.

As we have exposed the 'leak', the aggrieved students and parents seem to expect us to come out with an answer to this question as well and our emails have been flooded with queries.

Here, we would like to clarify that all that we have done was performing our bounden duty of exposing the leakage of question paper in time, but we are not the authority to decide on whether re-examination should be conducted only in Manipur or all over India. It is for the CBSE to decide.

Nonetheless, we feel that even if the demand for re-examination of the leaked Physics paper throughout the country is little far off the mark, the decision of the CBSE to reconduct the exam only in Manipur is still further off the mark, for some simple reasons.

In order to execute its functions effective and maintain the education standards, the administrative work of CBSE has been divided into eight regions with offices located at Chennai, Ajmer, Allahabad, Delhi, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Patna and Panchkula.

Affiliated schools in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andaman and Nicobar Island, Goa, Daman & Diu, Lakshadweep and Puducherry come under the jurisdiction of the regional office at Chennai; those in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram under Guwahati regional office.

Similarly, affiliated CBSE schools in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli come under the regional office at Ajmer; those in Haryana, Chandigarh, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh under the Panchkula office; those in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal under the regional office at Allahabad; West Bengal, Orissa and Chhattisgarh under the Regional office at Bhubaneswar; Bihar and Jharkhand under the Regional office at Patna while the regional office at Delhi is responsible for the administration of the affiliated CBSE schools in NCT of Delhi and foreign countries.

The question papers for all CBSE regions are normally set as 'Delhi' and 'Outside Delhi'. In other words, the question paper is same for all the regions except Delhi.

So, when the leaked question paper was that of 'Outside Delhi', then ordering retest only in Manipur on the ground the the leak was confirmed in Manipur is hard to understand as the same leaked question paper could have been excess and downloaded by anyone through the internet.

Perhaps, CBSE needs to do a rethink on the retest only in Manipur.