DERA GHAZI KHAN
The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education has admitted that a bundle comprising question papers for ninth class exams had gone missing while new question papers would be drafted with heavy costs.
The annual examinations for 2014 will start from March 19. The board top officer claimed that the expenditures would be paid by a bank wherefrom the bundle had been misplaced.
After the drafting of question papers and their printing at the confidential press of the board, the papers are handed over to the management of Habib Bank Limited within the jurisdiction of the board that comprises four districts including Dera Ghazi Khan, Muzaffargarh, Layyah and Rajanpur. The official told this scribe that the sealed bundles of the question papers were dispatched to the main branches of the bank at the district level from where these are forwarded to the remote stations where the network of the bank exists.
He said on condition of anonymity that one of the bundles went missing from the number of the bundles dispatched to Layyah district for which it is very difficult to disclose about the question papers it contained.
As a result of the negligence, all the bundles containing question papers have been called back from the four districts on the emergency basis while the senior teachers and the paper setters have been asked to draft new question papers.
When contacted the BISE Dera Ghazi Khan chairman confirmed that the question papers were missing while Prof Saeed Ahmed had been appointed as the inquiry officer to probe the issue. He claimed that the cost for the printing of the new question papers would be paid by the bank responsible for mistake. He clarified that the exam schedule would remain the same. Besides repeated attempts, the bank manager could not be accessed for his version on the issue.