Calcutta, April 23: A Madhyamik examinee and a train hawker helped police recover answer scripts of the secondary and higher secondary examinations that teachers had lost.

A bundle of 172 Madhyamik Bengali scripts and 80 HS history answer papers were found in Durgapur and on a Bongaon-bound train.

The HS scripts went missing from Sealdah station on Wednesday. Sahidur Rahman, a teacher of Taki Government School who collected them from a head-examiner in Salt Lake for evaluation and was heading to his Deganga home, lost them.

Sanat Das, the officer-in-charge of Government Railway Police in Bongaon, today said: “A hawker informed the Railway Protection Force (RPF) last night that he saw two bundles on a bunk of a Bongaon-bound train. The RPF informed us and we recovered the packets.”

Higher secondary council secretary Dibyendu Chakraborty said: “The scripts are intact. The seals of the packets were not broken. The teacher will be punished if found guilty.”

Mithu Dutta, who appeared for Madhyamik from Jemua Bhadubala Vidyapith in Durgapur, chanced upon a polythene packet stuffed with papers next to a roadside eatery on Phooljhor Road, 160 km from Calcutta, yesterday morning.

“I saw the transparent packet and picked it up out of curiosity. I opened it and found the scripts inside,” Mithu said. Hours after her elder brother called the police, Soumendu Bikash Das, a teacher of Palashdiha High School, lodged a diary at New Town police station saying that 172 scripts were missing from his possession.

Das said the scripts fell off his two-wheeler on the way to his head-examiner’s house.