The bane of leakage of question papers in the universities around Karnataka, which was rampant some years ago, has returned with a bang much to the discomfiture of thousands of students. The Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), which is the nodal agency for all engineering colleges in the state, was forced to cancel and postpone the examination of a paper in the seventh semester mechanical engineering course on Thursday after the VTU headquarters in Belgaum received a fax containing some hand written questions.

On verification, it was found that it tallied with the original questions, prompting the authorities to reschedule the examination to a later date. As it usually happens with such incidents, even before the students could recover from the shock, there was a spate of hoax attempts on Saturday at question paper leak. The VTU reportedly received around a dozen faxes claiming that the papers had leaked, but fortunately, it proved to be a false alarm.

As the examinations in different streams of engineering courses are scheduled to go on till January 21, the university has acted quickly to plug some of the loopholes. It has decided to print fresh question papers for the remaining examinations and despatch them to various colleges on the day of each examination, instead of sending them two or three days in advance as had been the practice. The new procedure may help in eliminating some sources of mischief, but the university must ensure that the question papers reach the various centres well in time and there is no scope for further confusion.

It is said to be the third instance of question paper leak in the VTU in the last few years. Strangely, the leak occurred even after the university started printing question papers at its own press in Belgaum to overcome the serious problem. The university would do well to conduct a thorough inquiry into the latest question paper leak and hand out exemplary punishment to those involved.

It is obviously a well-organised racket involving a huge amount of money and cannot take place without the involvement of some insiders. Such incidents continue to happen as the authorities do not pursue them vigorously enough after the initial flurry of action and the culprits invariably go scot free. The university should entrust the investigation to a police agency like CoD, obtain a report within a few weeks and initiate criminal action against those found to be involved. That’s the only way of curbing such activities which bring untold hardship to thousands of students.