Students take lessons in copying during SSC exams

Among the centres visited by the Express team, the most notorious ones were the ZP Higher Secondary School and Sarvodaya Vidyalaya at Hingna and the Sarasvati Kisan High School and Jijamata Secondary School at Butibori.

For instance, at Jijamata School, students could be seen leaningout of the windows and passing out question papers to their friends waiting outside. These ever helpful friends would then quickly seek out the answers from various guides and text books, tear out the relevant pages and hand them to the students.

But copying at its "very best" seemed to be going on in Hingna, where a ration shop near the school was chosen as the venue to solve question papers. In fact, it was an interesting sight to see students and young teachers busy flipping open guides and textbooks, hunting for answers and frantically scribbling them on any available piece of paper. A group of "courier" boys were rushing back and forth with the answers and the question papers.

These messenger boys scaled the school compound walls with feline grace and practiced ease. In fact, that one factor stood out the most in the whole affair — the way everything went on like clockwork. It was apparent that this was not a one-time affair. Each one knew exactly what he was supposed to do, including the policemenand the officials at the exam centre. How else could one explain the fact that the policemen remained mute spectators to the whole thing? All they did was to hurl abuses at the courier boys for creating too much noise!

Inside the school too, the "show" was just as ably managed by the officials in charge. Presumably, their job was to ensure that every student got their "rightful" share of the sheets with the answers. More shocking was the fact that most students could not write the answers even with an open textbook in front of them. Which is why they had to be fed the answers to specific questions from outside.

In fact, at some places, question papers were taken out of the centres, hurriedly photocopied, answers prepared and again photocopied and relayed back to the examination hall.

Funnily enough, after all this, a state publicity press release here says that district collector Malini Shankar paid "surprise" visits to some examination centres in Nagpur city and found that everything was okay. Ofcourse, the six centres she "surprised" are among the most reputed in the city.