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The crime branch of the Lucknow police busted a fake marksheet racket on Sunday and arrested four persons from a multi-storey complex on Hewett Road. The cops, however, disclosed the information on Monday. The police recovered around 400 fake marksheets, 800 papers used for printing them, rubber stamps of several fake examination boards, three laptops, five scanner-cum-printers, one CPU and 12 paper cutters. The gang was preparing fake marksheets for Class 10, 12 and graduation since 2012 and used to charge Rs 5,000 to 10,000 for each marksheet.

In the season of examination results and college admissions, we are again reminded of the dismal condition of the Indian education system. The Punjab School Education Board has, in an act of benevolence, granted 30 grace marks to Class 12 students. This helped lift the state’s pass percentage from 54% to 76%. In Gujarat, the pass percentage in Class 10 dropped from 73% in 2014-15 to 63% this year — which the state education minister attributes to the installation of CCTV cameras in examination centres that have checked cheating. Many Class 10 students in Gujarat could not answer elementary questions in a retest, despite securing over 80% in the objective section of the mathematics paper.

In the latest education scam from Bihar, it appears that students can purchase top-scoring intermediate certificates for around Rs 5 lakh without even having to write the exam. Moreover, many schools and colleges have been getting their affiliations by improper means. All these skeletons are tumbling out in the light of probes launched after a TV sting found this year’s top-scoring students struggling to answer basic questions about their subjects. Most memorably, one top student said that political science is about cooking. The rot in the state of education has certainly been a long time cooking.