The Bihar model of cheating in school-leaving board exams, made globally infamous by a photograph showing parents, relatives and well-wishers scaling a four-storey building which went viral a year ago, has evidently impacted the parents, relatives and well-wishers of 6.3 million students currently writing their high school and higher secondary board exams in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. According to cynics, UP — India’s most populous state (204 million) — is engaged in a neck-to-neck race with Bihar to the bottom of human development indices such as literacy, health, education and law and order among other markers.

On day two of the exams (February 19), a major embarrassment was visited upon the UP Board of High School and Intermediate Education when photographs of parents and relatives scaling up two and three-storey examination centres to hand over chits to examinees were widely circulated on social media. These incidents occurred in three schools in Fatehpur Sikri (Agra) stumping board officials. “We were aware of considerable cheating in exams, but now it has risen to a new level,” confesses R.P. Sharma, deputy director of the education department (Agra division). Later, more such pictures surfaced from Saadabad (Hathras) and Inglas (Aligarh), blasting the board’s promise of conducting fair school-leaving board exams this year. Quite clearly despite pulling out all the stops, UP state board officials haven’t been able to prevent over-zealous parents who have proved that malpractices Bihar can do, UP can do better.

Though in 2015, officially, only 2,227 of the 5.8 million students who wrote the exam were caught cheating, the actual number of cheats can safely be assumed to be much higher as the state’s education bureaucracy assumes a kinder approach to dealing with cheating (and even more notorious law-breakers) when the Samajwadi Party, which was elected four years ago, is in power.

Much of the failure to curb mass cheating in UP’s annual school-leaving exams can also be attributed to acts of omission and commission of the board itself. This year for instance, a much-publicised mobile application, which was to scan the bar codes of admit cards, failed to work leading to much confusion and loss of time on the first day of the exam.

While the failure of technology to prevent exam malpractice could perhaps be excused, officials failed to prevent even traditional cheats who carried chits into exam halls or who sent in proxies to write the exam. More worrisome is that incidents of exam malpractice are not being routinely reported to the board’s headquarters in Allahabad, which bears overall responsibility for the conduct of the annual classes X and XII exams. “Strict instructions have been issued to relay information of irregularities to the board within two hours of the end of the exam. Yet the instruction is not complied with,” admits Shail Yadav, secretary of the board.

According to R.P. Singh, secretary of the UP Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh (Association of Secondary School Teachers), this wilful non-compliance is because the board seems to have little control over its affairs. “Unrecognised schools are designated examination centres, fake admission cards are mass printed and cell phones routinely allowed into the examination halls every year. Many incidents of malpractice are reported and the board announces investigations into them. Yet investigations don’t seem to head anywhere and the supervision system remains lax with no long-term corrective measures initiated. This helplessness of the board inspires neither confidence nor fear,” says Singh.

While the official final count of the number of students caught cheating will be revealed only after the exams conclude on March 21, it’s clear that bureaucrats of the country’s largest school-leaving examination board are fighting a losing battle.

Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)