An unprecedented 2,39,133 examinees did not turn up to write the UP Board high school and intermediate examinations on Tuesday, the first day of the examinations.
Of these 1,57,042 were high school and 82,091 intermediate examinees, according to data released by the UP Madhyamik Siksha Parishad.
This huge number of examinees skipping the Hindi paper is significant as the paper was compulsory for both high school and intermediate students.
Meanwhile, officials registered FIRs against six examinees and one other person in different police stations under the Anti-Copying Act.
The first day also witnessed a total of 34 examinees being caught using unfair means across the state, including 26 boys and one girl of high school and seven boys of intermediate.
UP Board secretary Neena Srivastava said: “On the very first day of the exams, over 2.39 lakh students out of the total registered 55,23,404 skipped the paper,”
She said that as per information received online from across the state till 7pm, around 2,39,133 students were marked absent from their exams.
Board officials said as reports from many centres were awaited, the count of absentees could rise further.
Last year after the end of first two days of examinations, only 40,392 students had skipped the papers. The figure included 20,674 students who did not turn up to write their paper on the first day in 2019.
Deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma said these are those students who had applied in the UP Board examination from multiple districts.
“Such students had appeared from one district and chose to ignore the other districts.,” Sharma said.
He said, “I’m not at all surprised with 2.39 lakh students skipping the examination on first day. What is satisfying is that the examination went off smoothly in all 75 districts and there was no major incident.”
In 2018, some 12.5 lakh examinees skipped the exam midway while in 2019 the number came down to 6.69 lakh examinees.
