LUCKNOW,  Nearly 2.39 lakh students of class 10 and 12 have skipped the board examinations on the first day. A total of 56 lakh students had registered for the examinations.

According to the data released by the UP Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad, 2,39,133 examinees did not turn up to take the UP Board high school and intermediate examinations on Tuesday.

Of these 1,57,042 were high school and 82,091 intermediate examinees.

This huge number of examinees skipping the examination is baffling since the first paper was Hindi for both the classes.

Officials have also registered FIRs against six examinees and one other person in different police stations under the Anti-Copying Act.

A total of 34 examinees were also caught using unfair means in the examinations. These include 26 boys and one girl of high school and seven boys of intermediate class.

UP Board secretary Neena Srivastava said, "The number of students skipping examinations could be higher since reports from several districts had not yet come in. Last year, after the end of first two days of examinations, only 40,392 students had skipped the papers. The figure included 20,674 students who did not turn up to write their paper on the first day in 2019."

Deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma said these are those students who had applied in the UP Board examination from multiple districts.

"Such students had appeared from one district and chose to ignore the other districts," he said.

The deputy chief minister further said, "I am not at all surprised with 2.39 lakh students skipping the examination on first day. What is satisfying is that the examination went off smoothly in all 75 districts and there was no major incident."

In 2018, 12.5 lakh examinees skipped the exam midway while in 2019 the number came down to 6.69 lakh examinees.