Lucknow, May 28: Triumph of the tenacious, as their principal claimed, or another scam?

Uttar Pradesh education officials woke up to the uncomfortable question after three students from a little-known district school ranked first, second and third on the merit list of the secondary board examinations.

If this jolted authorities of top schools in Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad and Varanasi, more shock was in store after the results were published yesterday. The seventh and 20th positions also went to the same institution, Maharani Laxmi Bai Memorial Inter College, in Barabanki district, about 56 km from here, while 327 of the 332 students from the school who sat for the tests got first division.

“We don’t have any quarrel with talented rural students. What puzzles us is that these talented students are all concentrated in one or two schools in a particular district,” said S.K. Kothari, a Lucknow school principal.

The whiff of a result scam has come within hours of the pre-medical test paper leak that yesterday forced authorities to postpone the examination indefinitely.

In the secondary examination results, Bhupendra Singh, Bharat Sharma and Devendra Kumar Verma topped the list with 88.83, 88 and 87 per cent marks. If the Barabanki school sealed the top three positions, another in Hardoi figured thrice among the top 20 students. Other schools that fared remarkably well are from Unnao, Mainpuri and Ghaziabad districts.

The list triggered a wave of protests from academics and school principals who have called for a review. “We demand that the papers of the three top students be made public to let other students draw inspiration from them,” said Bimal Gupta, a former member of the state’s education think-tank.

The principal of the Maharani Laxmi Bai institute, however, defended his school’s performance. “What is this hue and cry about results?” asked R.K. Shukla. “My students have done better than others due to their perseverance and merit. Besides, they got better teachers to guide them.”

But the protests have forced the director of Uttar Pradesh Secondary Education, Sanjay Mohan, to order a probe. “The papers of toppers in the examination would be reassessed before we arrive at any conclusion on the controversy,” he said.

Academics suspect that corrupt school officials in some districts took advantage of the self-centre system, introduced this year, by letting students copy from answers prepared by experts. Earlier, students of a school sat for their board examinations in another institution.

Veteran academics said most of the schools in the districts are owned by politicians. “These politicians are believed to be manipulating the results to brighten up the images of their schools. It is their men only who run the copying mafia,” said Ayodhyanath Tripathi, a 70-year-old former school principal. “Isn’t it scary?”