Failed, Rohtas boy fights BSEB & wins

PATNA: The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has done it again.
Close on the heels of wrongly flunking Saharsa’s Priyanka Singh in Class XII finals of 2017, the state school exam board failed Dhananjay Kumar in Class X finals this year, showing him to have scored just 02 out of 100 marks in Hindi.
The Rohtas boy applied for scrutiny, but his marks did not improve. Unfazed, he filed an RTI application through which he got a photocopy of his Hindi answer-sheet on November 1.It showed his marks as 79.
Yet, the harried youngster was allegedly made to run in circles to get a corrected mark-sheet for two weeks. “On November 15, I went to a TV channel which telecast my tragic tale. In the middle of the show, the channel got a call, asking it to send me to the BSEB office to collect my revised result,” the boy told TOI, expressing happiness that he passed even though it was nearly five months after his classmates got their results in June this year.
Dhananjay, who has scored 80 in Science, 96 in mathematics and 79 in Sanskrit, was sure he would not lose one precious year as his school at Tilouthu in Rohtas had given him time to get his result corrected.
“Like me, even my school principal and teachers were sure that I couldn’t fail,” he said on Wednesday as he thanked them and his cousin Shambhu Kumar, who accompanied him to the BSEB HQ in Patna, for their help.
On Thursday, however, the teenager was in for disappointment as the Tilothu school could not grant him admission because there were no vacant seats. “I finally took admission to Class XI at a school at Jagodih, six km from Tilouthu,” he told this reporter over the phone from Rohtas.
Saharsa’s Priyanka, who had been given 09 out of 100 in Sanskrit and 29 out of 80 in science (theory), finally got justice after a legal battle. The BSEB admitted in the Patna high court that the barcodes on her answer-sheets had been interchanged with those of another examinee by someone associated with the examination process.
While the BSEB announced the Class XII results in May this year, it was on October 18 that it declared Priyanka pass with 61 out of 100 in Sanskrit and 80 out of 80 marks in science (theory), totalling 422 out of 500. However, the bright girl lost a year of her academic pursuit as admissions to graduation courses all over the country had been over by then.
The BSEB was fined Rs 5 lakh, to be paid as compensation to to the girl. An FIR was also lodged by the BSEB in Saharsa in connection with the change of her barcodes.