OMG! Cheating nothing new in Bihar. That's how I did it
The picture showing mass cheating during the class 10 board exam in Bihar has gone viral, and brought with it a sense of déjà vu.
To be honest, board exams in Bihar have always been like this. Family and friends have a big role to play as it is a battle for them too. In our poor state, the "Matric" is the first test in the life of an average Bihari - we need to clear it at any cost. Cheating is a small compromise towards this goal. Many families rely on political jugaad and approach tabulators with money.
Indeed, in Bihar, the class 10 board exam is a big affair. In my case, my mother stayed with me for ten days at a room we had rented near the exam centre. She would cook good food for me and, each week, my father would write letters to me from Kolkata, asking how I was preparing for the biggest test of my life.
In the past 30 years, the only time when mass cheating didn't happen was the year I appeared for the board exam. The judiciary was so miffed with the scale of unfair means being used during Lalu Prasad Yadav's "Jungle Raj" that they decided to supervise the board examinations with the help of the judicial staff. No outside help was available. Reciting Quranic verses was my only resort to do well in maths. My entire life depended on one paper's outcome. Even a mark less than the passing score - 30 out of 100 - would have made me fail the exam. It would become a matter of shame for the entire family, a blot on the reputation of my school's 100 per cent result.I would get anxious about their expectations. My biggest worry was mathematics - there was every chance that I would fail it. Truth be told, I was banking on the outside support that comes in the form of chits, not necessarily from your own sources, but accidentally; some would land on you like misguided missiles. And when I heard that the Patna High Court had decided to supervise the matric examinations all over Bihar the year I took the exam, in 1996, I got cold feet. I was left with no hope because mathematics alone could kill my chances of passing the most exalted exam of my life.
Amid all the fear and concerns, I found the boy sitting next to me solving equations without much difficulty. However, his biggest concern was Persian, which he had opted for in place of Sanskrit. I looked towards him helplessly and he was ready to exchange answer sheets so that I could copy his answers for this paper, while he would do the same for the Persian exam. And it worked out well. We would swap our answer sheets intermittently and both of us made it through. I had secured just the passing mark in mathematics, but managed to do well in the other papers. This covered for my loss. The overall pass percentage in the board exams that year was 12 per cent in Bihar.
After this, I appeared for the higher secondary, graduation and post graduation exams, but no one wanted know about my chances of passing them. Only the results of class 10 mattered to them - the first and the biggest test of life as it were, or as it was made out to be.