CUTTACK: The Board of Secondary Education (BSE) on Thursday postponed the rescheduled Special Odisha Teacher Eligibility Test (OTET)-2025 which was slated for August 31, citing ‘some unavoidable circumstances’.
“It is for information of all concerned that the SOTET (paper-I and paper-II) scheduled to be held on 31.8.2025 is hereby deferred due to some unavoidable circumstances and will be held shortly,” read the notification issued by the BSE.
This is for the second time that the Special OTET has been postponed. The earlier exam, scheduled on July 20, was cancelled just a few hours before the test after images of handwritten question papers, both in English and Odia, were leaked on social media.
Later on August 1, the BSE authorities issues a fresh notification rescheduling the exam on August 31. As per the notification, the rescheduled Special OTET was to be conducted on August 31 and the candidates were advised to avail the admit cards from BSE’s website.
As many as 75,403 in-service teachers including 29,004 for paper-I (for primary school teachers from classes I to V) and 46,399 for paper-II (for upper primary school teachers from classes VI to VIII) across the state would have appeared for the examination for regularisation of their service. But the postponement of the exam just days ahead of its scheduled date, has left candidates in a quandary.
“We have been devoting our time towards preparing for the examination. But all our efforts have now gone in vain with the BSE postponing the rescheduled test. The board is playing with our future,” said some candidates.
Meanwhile, sources attributed the BSE’s decision to postpone the exam to the time-taking task of preparing the question papers again from scratch. The board generally prepares and prints three different sets of question papers for each exam, keeping the other sets in reserve in case one is compromised.
For the Special OTET-2025, initially scheduled on July 20, all the three sets which were prepared and printed, were leaked and under such circumstances, preparing and printing fresh question papers within a short time-frame was apparently not possible prompting the BSE authorities to postpone the rescheduled Special OTET-2025, the sources added.
On the other hand, the Crime Branch of Odisha Police which is investigating the case, took Sanatana Bisoi, president of ex-cadre teachers’ association of Koraput district and Ramjee Prasad Gupta, a businessman of Badambadi locality in Cuttack, on a one-day remand to extract more information on the sale of the leaked question papers besides ascertaining the money trail.