In the ongoing MP Board examinations of 2026, a familiar pattern has once again emerged from the 9,856 examination centres spread across Madhya Pradesh — and once again, it is Morena district leading the state in a ranking no district wants to top: cases of Use of Unfair Means (UFM).
The latest reports from the MP Board of Secondary Education (MPBSE) confirm that among the cheating cases registered this exam season, Morena has consistently contributed the lion's share. And among the methods being used to beat the system — CCTV cameras, two invigilators per room, frisking at entry gates — one old trick has proven stubbornly difficult to eliminate: the "bhola" method, combined with the audacious use of a second answer sheet.
Understanding how cheating survives in MP's board exams — despite some of the most technologically advanced anti-malpractice systems deployed by any state board in India — is not just a story about individual students taking shortcuts. It is a story about systemic failure, administrative complicity, and a district-level culture in parts of Madhya Pradesh where exam cheating has become an intergenerational institution.
The Numbers: 16 Lakh Students, and a Persistent Fraud Problem
This year, approximately 16.60 lakh students are appearing for the MPBSE board exams — around 9.53 lakh in Class 10 and 7.06 lakh in Class 12. Exams began on February 13, 2026 and run through early March. The Board implemented a pilot CCTV surveillance project across 226 centres in nine districts, representing its most aggressive technological investment in exam integrity to date.
The results of CCTV monitoring have been revealing — and not just in catching cheaters. When CCTV cameras were installed at a cluster of Bhopal centres for the Class 12 English paper, six of the seven cheating cases detected were spotted through live surveillance, not by invigilators. The Board publicly credited CCTV as effective. What it also inadvertently revealed was that invigilators — the human layer of oversight — were failing in their duties. Authorities issued "strict instructions for disciplinary action" against negligent invigilators at multiple centres.
The Sanskrit paper for Class 10 alone produced 13 UFM cases in a single day — nine of them from Morena, with the remaining four from Guna, Betul, and Bhopal. No UFM cases were recorded in the Class 12 Psychology paper on the same day.
What Is the "Bhola" Method?
In the vernacular of exam malpractice in MP's Chambal region, a "bhola" refers to an accomplice — typically an older student, a hired proxy, or a member of the student's social network — who sits near the examinee or outside the examination hall and helps pass pre-written answers into the exam room.
The bhola method operates in several variants:
Variant 1 — The Chit Chain: The bhola waits near a window, ventilation gap, or toilet break point with pre-written chits containing answers. The student slips out briefly or passes a signal, receives the chit, and copies the answers onto the official answer sheet.
Variant 2 — The Second Paper (Duplicate Answer Sheet): In this more sophisticated version, the bhola — or a corrupt invigilator — introduces a pre-filled second answer booklet into the exam hall. The student either substitutes this for their official sheet entirely or copies from it. This method requires either active invigilator complicity or a moment of invigilator inattention to introduce the material.
Variant 3 — Mobile-Assisted Bhola: The student carries a hidden mobile phone. Answers are typed by an outside accomplice in real time and texted or sent via WhatsApp to the student inside the hall. CCTV has caught multiple instances of this in 2026, particularly students scrolling rapidly through answer photos in the first 10-15 minutes of an exam — a detection flag that the Employees' Selection Board (ESB, the reconstituted Vyapam) has specifically built into its algorithmic fraud detection systems.
The "second paper" variant is particularly damaging because, if successful, it produces a clean, well-written answer sheet with no visible evidence of cheating. The entire fraud is eliminated from the physical record unless the invigilator or a vigilance officer specifically checks for the introduction of unauthorised material — which requires either surveillance footage or a tip-off.
Why Morena Keeps Topping This List
Morena district, in MP's Chambal region, has appeared at the top of the state's UFM charts so consistently across exam seasons that education officials no longer express surprise — they merely record and report it.
There are structural reasons for this. The Chambal region has historically had lower literacy rates, fewer quality secondary schools per capita, and a culture where accessing higher education and government employment — both dependent on board exam marks — has made the competitive pressure on students and families extreme. In communities where a Class 12 certificate is a gateway to a government job, an army or police recruitment test, or a college seat in an engineering or medical stream, the incentive to cheat is not just academic. It is economic.
The organised nature of cheating in Morena — the "bhola" networks, the advance printing of answer chits, the mobile relay systems — reflects the involvement of adults outside the exam hall: parents, local fixers, centre staff, and in some documented cases, school principals. In February 2026, six cheating cases were reported from Morena district in the Gwalior division during a single subject paper — the same week that Bhopal's six CCTV-detected cases made headlines.
The MP High Court has repeatedly expressed concern about exam malpractice in MP's board examinations. In earlier years, mass cheating scandals in the Chambal region — where relatives climbed school walls to pass chits to students — were documented and widely photographed. The introduction of CCTV and biometric attendance has reduced the most brazen forms of open cheating. It has not eliminated the subtler, insider-assisted methods.
The CCTV Paradox: Better Detection, Same Systemic Problem
The 2026 board exams represent the most technologically equipped examination season in MPBSE history. The Board implemented a pilot CCTV surveillance project at 226 centres across nine districts for the Class 12 Higher Secondary examination. Live feeds are monitored by designated officers. Entry points are equipped with frisking protocols.
And yet the cheating continues. The paradox is instructive.
CCTV is effective at detecting visible, physical cheating — a student pulling a chit from a sock, copying openly, or using a mobile phone. It is much less effective at detecting cheating that has already been set up before the exam — a pre-filled second answer sheet introduced with invigilator complicity, or answers memorised from photographs sent the night before.
More fundamentally, CCTV cannot fix the human compliance problem. When invigilators are themselves part of the cheating ecosystem — through negligence, fear of local pressure, or active corruption — no number of cameras fixes the underlying failure. The Board's own acknowledgment that invigilators were "negligent in their duties" at centres where cheating occurred despite surveillance confirms this gap.
The ESB's experience with its recruitment exams adds another dimension. The ESB sniffed a scam during analysis of performance data of candidates who had scored unusually high marks and found that candidates from Bhind and Morena in the Chambal region were scrolling through question papers rapidly in the first 10-15 minutes without attempting to answer — a behavioural signature that suggested pre-knowledge of answers rather than on-the-spot cheating. Of the 12 candidates booked, nine were from Bhind and Morena.
This data-analytics approach — looking for statistical anomalies in performance patterns — may ultimately prove more effective than physical surveillance in detecting organised, insider-enabled exam fraud. But it requires a level of post-exam analysis that MPBSE has not yet publicly committed to implementing at scale for board exams.
The Invigilator Problem: Accountability Within the Hall
Every documented cheating case in the 2026 MP board exam season has an invigilator dimension. Either an invigilator was negligent (failing to frisk properly, ignoring mobile phone use, not noticing a second answer sheet), or an invigilator was complicit (actively facilitating the introduction of chits or substitute papers).
The Board has issued disciplinary warnings to invigilators at centres where cheating occurred despite their presence. But warnings, without structural reform of how invigilators are selected, trained, supervised, and held accountable, are unlikely to change behaviour in districts where local social pressure to allow cheating is intense.
In Morena and other Chambal districts, invigilators frequently live in the same communities as the students they are examining. Refusing to allow a prominent local family's child to use a chit carries social costs that can extend well beyond the examination hall. The anonymity and distance that makes honest invigilation easier in urban centres does not exist in rural Morena.
This is why several education reform advocates have recommended — and some states have implemented — flying squads of external invigilators from other districts, rotated randomly, for high-risk examination centres. MP has used flying squad inspections but has not universally replaced local invigilators with outside teams.
What MP Is Doing Right — And What Still Needs to Change
The 2026 board exams have seen genuine progress on anti-cheating measures:
CM Mohan Yadav's announcement of twice-yearly board exams (starting 2025-26) reduces the single-exam, all-or-nothing pressure that drives desperation cheating. If students know they have a second chance, the marginal incentive to cheat in the first sitting decreases.
CCTV at 226 centres is a meaningful expansion from zero. The pilot data — including the Bhopal cases where CCTV outperformed invigilators — makes a strong case for universal CCTV coverage across all 9,856 centres over the next two to three exam cycles.
CBSE's 2026 rule changes are also worth noting as a national benchmark: CBSE will no longer allow students who've had a subject result withheld for use of 'unfair means' to pass with scores in a 6th or 7th subject — closing a loophole that up to 30-40% of caught cheaters had been exploiting. MPBSE would benefit from a similar structural tightening of consequences.
What still needs urgent attention in MP:
The second answer sheet / bhola network problem requires an administrative solution, not a technological one. Randomised seating allocation (already partially implemented), tamper-evident answer booklets with unique barcodes, and real-time booklet reconciliation at exam centres can make the introduction of substitute sheets operationally much harder.
Invigilator rotation across districts — particularly for Morena and other high-UFM zones — would directly address the social pressure problem that makes local invigilators complicit by default.
Post-exam performance analytics, similar to what ESB deployed for recruitment exams, should be extended to board results: anomalous score jumps, unusual centre-level pass rates, and suspicious answer pattern clustering can all flag centres where organised cheating may have succeeded despite surveillance.
The Bigger Picture: What Exam Cheating Really Costs
Every student who cheats and gets away with it imposes a cost on the student who studied honestly. In a state where board marks determine everything from college admissions to government job eligibility, a cheated mark sheet is not just an academic dishonesty — it is a form of theft from every honest student in the same batch.
For MP, a state with 16.60 lakh students sitting board exams and a government that has publicly staked its education reputation on exam integrity, the persistence of organised cheating in Morena and other districts is an ongoing credibility problem. The infrastructure is improving. The culture is slower to change.
The bhola is still out there. And until the system makes it structurally impossible — not just risky — for him to do his job, the second answer sheet will keep making its way into exam halls across Chambal.
Key Takeaways
- MP Board 2026 exams involve 16.60 lakh students across 9,856 centres; exams ran from February 13 to early March 2026.
- Morena district in the Chambal region consistently tops MP's UFM (Use of Unfair Means) charts; nine of 13 cheating cases in a single Sanskrit exam day came from Morena.
- The "bhola" method — an outside accomplice passing pre-written answers — remains the most difficult cheating variant to detect or prevent.
- The second answer sheet variant requires invigilator complicity or negligence to introduce a pre-filled booklet into the exam hall.
- MPBSE's CCTV pilot at 226 centres was effective at catching visible cheating but exposed invigilator negligence as the deeper problem.
- ESB (Vyapam successor) used data analytics to catch Chambal-region cheaters in recruitment exams — a model MPBSE should adopt for board exams.
- CM Yadav's twice-yearly exam system reduces single-sitting desperation; CBSE's new UFM rules provide a template for stricter MP consequences.
- Structural fixes needed: cross-district invigilator rotation, tamper-evident answer booklets, and post-exam performance anomaly analysis.
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