Nagpur: After two incidents of an alleged paper leak at a Nagpur centre during HSC exam and another of mass copying in Gadchiroli, the Nagpur divisional board office has decided to tighten the security protocol. Divisional board chairman Shivling Patve has ordered all runners (people who deliver question papers to the exam centres) to share their live location on smartphone till their work is done. Apart from this, the CCTV footage from inside the exam centre is to be preserved in offline mode as well for future scrutiny.Patve said, “The live location will help the board to know time and route taken by runners. The data will later also be analyzed regarding time taken on the route, number of stops and the duration of halts.”If a particular setting is enabled on Google Maps, then the smartphone keeps track of the person’s travel history with date and time. This digitally stored data can later be used to analyze movement of the person. This however has legal grey areas, because technically the live location and timeline data only tracks movement of the device. So it’s always difficult to prove that the device was indeed with its registered owner. However for the divisional board this won’t be a problem because all runners have their mobile numbers registered with the authorities.TOI had explained in detail how a question paper travels from the board’s custody (official term for warehouse/safe house) to the student. The board’s other directive is about CCTV footage from the room where the question paper bundle is handed over to the centre head by runners. The CCTV footage is mandated to be saved for 30 days post the exams and that is usually done in the connected DVRs. Since DVRs have limited memory, this valuable footage gets recorded over using the loop recording setting. Patve said, “The footage has to be stored in pen drives, so that it is available in offline mode whenever required.”BOXEnglish paper went off smoothly: BoardThe English paper for SSC on Friday went off without any hiccups, according to board officials. Divisional board chairman Shivling Patve said, “There were zero cases of both copying and malpractices.” He added that English and other language papers are considered easy by students because there is a scope for writing more.
