Patnaik exempts fees for students appearing in Board exam

Keeping in view adverse impact ofCOVID-19 pandemic on the livelihood of the people acrossOdisha, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday announcedthat the state government will not charge any fee fromstudents appearing in the Matric examination.

Patnaik decided to waive the fees for the annualexamination, conducted by the Board of Secondary Education, inthe greater interest of the students.

The matriculation exam is scheduled to begin in thestate from May 3 this year.

''The state government will bear Rs 27 crore on thisaccount and more than 6 lakh students will be benefited'', thechief minister said in a statement.

Every candidate appearing in the annual high schoolcertificate examination was supposed to pay Rs 420 for fillingup the forms.

Patnaik said the education sector is one the worstsufferer of the pandemic as the students could not attendclasses for nine long months which has affected their studies.

''No student will be denied opportunity to appear in theannual board examination for class 10th due to financialconstraints,'' Patnaik said.

The state government keeping in view the decline in reportof new COVID-19 cases in Odisha, has reopened schools for thefinal year students of Standard X and XII from January 8.

Ruling BJDs students wing state president Debi RanjanTripathy, earlier in the day had requested the chief ministerto consider waiving the examination fee.

Tripathy said most of the class 10th students are not ina position to pay the fee while filling up the form to appearin the matriculation examination due to the pandemicsituation.

Earlier, the Odisha government had made arrangements offree transportation and accomodation for the studentsappearing in NEET,JEE exams in the state late last year in thewake of coronavirus outbreak.

The government had provided buses to ferry NEET and JEEexams students from their home town to the designated testvenues in September last year.

It had also requested the East Coast Railway, having itsheadquarters at Bhubaneswar, to run special trains for theNEET aspirants to go to different parts of the state.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)