Lucknow, Feb 14 (IANS): The UP Board Secondary Education Board has initiated a slew of measures to ensure free and fair board exams, scheduled to be held from February 16 to March 4.

Around 59 lakh students will be taking the examinations, according to the official spokesman.

The Board has identified 936 examination centres for Class 10 and 12 as sensitive, besides another 242 as highly sensitive.

This year 31.1 lakh students have been registered for Class 10 and 27.7 lakh for Class 12. These candidates will take the exam at 8,753 exam centres.

In all, 170 imprisoned candidates have also registered themselves.

Sixteen districts, including Ballia, Azamgarh, Mau, Ghazipur, Chandauli, Jaunpur, Deoria, Gonda, Mathura, Aligarh, Mainpuri, Etah, Baghpat, Hardoi, Prayagraj and Kaushambhi have been identified as sensitive.

A call centre will also be operational during the examinations with two helpline numbers.

The 'monitoring and control room' set up for CCTV surveillance is located in the office of the secondary education directorate in the state capital.

It will be the nerve centre of the state government's campaign to stop the menace of cheating.

With over 58.8 lakh registrations, the UP Board examinations will be conducted in 1.4 lakh classrooms in 8,753 centres.

Each examination hall has two CCTV cameras, voice recorder and router to be used for live monitoring.

The state-level control room is set up for CCTV surveillance and is connected to all district control rooms to monitor voice recordings of nearly 2.9 lakh CCTV cameras at all examination centres.