KOLKATA: The West Bengal government cancelled today's scheduled Industrial Training Institute entrance examination and deferred it to July 5 after question papers were allegedly leaked.
Announcing this here today, state's Technical Education and Training Minister Ujjal Biswas said the decision was taken following complaints of question paper leaks in several newspapers.
"The Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) Entrance Exam in the state will now be held on July 5," Biswas said, adding that a total of 1.33 lakh candidates had applied for the examination this year against nearly 80,000 last year.
The Minister also suspected the hands of the main opposition CPI(M) behind the question paper leak, while describing this as a "conspiracy to malign the image of the state government".
Stating that a probe was ordered into the case by a three-member committee headed by a Joint Secretary of the Technical Education Department, Biswas said that the culprits would be punished severely after the committee submitted its report after a week.
Biswas said that the examination was scheduled to select nearly 40,000 candidates for over 100 government and private ITI colleges in the state.