Assam may become the country's first state to have stringent laws in place to contain cheating in public exams. In a bill tabled in the assembly today, the state government has proposed minimum punishment of five years' jail time and a fine of Rs 10 lakh. The ambit of people who can be tried under the Assam Public Examination (Measures for Prevention of unfair Means in Recruitment) Bill, 2024, is wide. It involves not only the examinee, but also the authorities in charge of conducting exams.
The bill proposes punishment of imprisonment of five to ten years, and fine of Rs 10 lakh to Rs 1 crore, the government said in a statement to the media today. For the examinee who cheats, the punishment is less severe – three years in jail and Rs 1 lakh fine. But failure to pay the fine would mean another two years in jail.
Separate courts will be designated to try cases involving exam paper leak.
Once convicted under this new law, a person cannot appear in any public exams for two years. Institutions found guilty of malpractice can be banned forever.
The complaints will be investigated by police officers who are not below the rank of Deputy Superintendents.
The proposed bill categorically mentions the possible wrongdoings on part of people involved in conducting the exams: "Indulging any attempt to leak, to procure, sell, to print, to solve question paper, directly or indirectly to assist examinee in unauthorized manner, to conduct examination in not designated centers or print question papers or blank answer scripts in not designated printing press".
For them, the jail term could stretch to 10 years and the fine to Rs 10 crore.
While Assam is not notorious as Bihar or Jharkhand when it comes to cheating, in 2022, cellphone internet was shut down for four hours in parts of the state's 25 districts during exams for third-and-fourth-grade posts.
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