Patna: Over 42,000 answer scripts of candidates who wrote the Class X Matriculation examinations conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) this year have gone missing from the strong-room of a school in Gopalganj where they had been kept after evaluation.

The results, scheduled to have been declared on Wednesday, will now be published on June 26, the BSEB said in a statement.

The answer scripts had been kept in 213 bags, all of which have disappeared.

The headmaster of A.S. Balika Plus 2 High School, Gopalganj, Pramod Kumar Srivastava, was arrested on Tuesday after he failed to reply satisfactorily to the queries of senior BSEB officials in Patna about the missing bags.

Preliminary investigation revealed that there were 21 employees at the Gopalganj school.

The disappearance of the bags came to the fore when two BSEB officials - Pradeep Kumar and Sujeet Kumar - visited the school last week to collect 12 answer sheets of science, social science, Hindi, English, Sanskrit and Mathematics of top rank holders for verification.

On June 15, the day the office was closed owing to Eid, the answer sheets were found to be missing from the strong-room. The peon of the school, Chhatu Singh, insisted that he had sealed the strong-room after the evaluation of the answer sheets at the examination centre. The night guard was also questioned, but he denied his involvement.

On June 17, an FIR (No. 295/18) was lodged with the Gopalganj town police station under sections 381 and 120B of the IPC. The police complaint was lodged on the statement of the principal-cum-centre superintendent, Srivastava. On Tuesday, he was summoned to the BSEB office in Patna for quizzing. He was arrested later in the day.

A BSEB press communiqué said the Gopalganj district magistrate and superintendent of police have been asked to conduct an in-depth probe. In addition, the board has directed senior officials of the district to recover the bar-coded answer sheets.

The board, however, clarified that the details of the marks awarded to the examinees had already been provided.

"So the disappearance of the answer sheets will not affect the results of the examination," BSEB chairman Anand Kishor clarified.

Kishor also said the development would not have any impact on the merit list. "The results of the Class X board and selection of the top 10 students would not be affected," he asserted.

The Bihar Madhyamik Sikshak Sangh has condemned the arrest of principal Srivastava. In a statement, the outfit's president, Kedar Pandey, said it was not fair to blame the principal for the answer sheets going missing.

"The board has always been shirking its responsibility in conducting fair examinations and publishing error-free results. Most of the schools don't have any peon or night guards," said the president.

Around 17 lakh students had appeared at the examination conducted at 1,426 examination centres between February 21 and 28, 2018.

Reports said of the bags missing, 115 contained answer sheets of science, 50 had social science papers and 16 had mathematics scripts.