Calcutta, March 16: It was a “lapse”, not a leak.

The verdict from the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education on a sheaf of Madhyamik mathematics “suggestions” mysteriously landing up in the office of a private TV channel just before the exam started on Monday slammed the doors on the episode.

About 70 per cent of the “suggestions” had tallied with the questions that made it to the test paper as a result of the “lapse”.

Board president Dibyendu Hota admitted on Tuesday that there was a “lapse” somewhere down the line and did not rule out the involvement of someone “within the board” in Monday’s mathematics mystery.

“Lapses, if any, on the part of the board or its officials, will be probed,” said Hota.

In the Assembly on Tuesday, Opposition Trinamul Congress and Congress legislators staged a brief walkout in a noisy protest against the “leak” of question papers.

While Trinamul MLAs demanded the resignation of school education minister Kanti Biswas and Madhyamik board president Hota, the Congress demanded an “immediate statement” from the minister.

Biswas was quick to dismiss talk of Monday’s math paper being “tough” and reiterated that there had been no leak.

“We are conscious about the interests and future of the students. I have already spoken to mathematics teachers, who told me that the paper was set in a way that every examinee could answer 50 per cent to 80 per cent of it. About 20 per cent of the paper was meant for meritorious students. All questions were within the syllabus,” the minister told the Assembly.

Biswas maintained that there was no question of a leak, as the exam had started at noon and a TV channel contacted the board office seven minutes later.

“Then, a fax arrived from the TV channel, on which some questions were hand-written,” recounted the minister.

The CPM-dominated All Bengal Teachers’ Association also took the board’s “lapse” line.

Association members said that someone could have swiped a question paper from one of the examination venues minutes after it got underway on Monday and handed it over to the TV channel’s office.

This, they admitted, was a lapse on the part of the board and its officials, as no one inside the examination venue is allowed to step out for an hour after an examination starts.

Admitting that it was the responsibility of the board to ensure that question papers are not taken out of examination halls for an hour, Hota said: “We will not hesitate to take stern action against the culprit, even if he is found to be someone within the board.”

Hota claimed that it would “not be very difficult” to trace the culprits. “We have the machinery to identify them very soon… We will complete the probe swiftly in our own interests,” he added.

As for the complaints pouring in about the mathematics paper being “unfair”, Hota said the board would offer “proper relief” to candidates in case a meeting of mathematics head-examiners concluded that the paper was truly tough.