Telangana Inter results fiasco : Urgent need for a foolproof system

Intermediate or the plus two stage is a very crucial phase in the academic and the future professional life of students in India.

In a system where there is no flexibility of interchange between disciplines at a later stage Intermediate decides in what profession a student is going to finally take up in his/her career.

But this is the phase of exams which at different times were mismanaged leading to a lot of suffering and heart burn among students and their parents.

We had earlier cases of leakage of question papers errors in jumbling giving rise to Minister wanting to resign owning up moral responsibility (in a carefully orchestrated move) which promptly is rejected by the chief Minister.

Never in the past has this issue been messed up to a level as is done by the Telangana Intermediate Board now resulting in suicides by about twenty students bringing untold, avoidable sufferings to those families.

The Honourable High Court intervened and ordered for the re- evaluation of the answer scripts and the opposition demoralised as it is by the recent elections found an opportunity to corner the government.

The government was also not quick in its response in addressing the issues thus allowing issue to remain live.

The fault looks to be not so much at the valuation stage but at the stage of aggregation and declaration of results.

The three-member committee appointed by the government has also squarely blamed Globarena company entrusted with this job and the lack of proper supervision at the level of the Intermediate Board.

The way the Intermediate education is structured in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh state continues to be the same in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh now.

There is a Commissioner of Intermediate Education who is the administrative head for the government colleges and Board of Intermediate Education responsible for the academic content, syllabus and conducting of the examinations.

Unlike some other states where you have regional offices of the Intermediate Board which manage the exams evaluation and declaration of results in a decentralised way, in both the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana we have a centralised system of Board of Intermediate office managing the conduct of exams evaluation and declaration of results.

Centre for Good Governance was roped in as an agency to select the firm to do the aggregation grading and declaration of results for the Intermediate Board as the Intermediate Board lacked necessary competence in this.

CGG was taking up the responsibility for aggregation grading declaration of results and getting it done by an agency selected and supervised by it.

Why this system was dispensed with and Board of Intermediate education took on itself the responsibility of selecting the agency and supervising it needs to be looked into.

This itself seems to have caused all the problem as a new agency was selected and Board of Intermediate Education lacked the needed expertise to supervise its work.

There were warning bells from the staff of Intermediate Board which authorities did not take serious note of.

Similar problems one does not face with EAMCET exams since JNTU has the necessary expertise to supervise such operations internally.

Andhra Pradesh Intermediate Board continued with the same agency which was working for the CGG and hence was able to conduct exam smoothly even though they did not have the advantage of services of CGG after bifurcation.

Certain minimum precautionary principle of a certain percentage of results being compared manually with the answer sheet numbers to confirm that aggregation done electronically is in order could have alerted them in time to take necessary corrective action.

This does not seem to have been taken care by the Board of Intermediate examination.

All this has resulted in students paying a heavy price for no fault of theirs.

It is time government wakes up and puts in place a fool proof system not only for Intermediate examinations but for all examinations as well.

I end my article with an anecdote told to me that happened before I joined as collector Khammam.

That year also there was leakage of Intermediate exam question paper and the then Minister Higher Education owning moral responsibility offered his resignation, confident that the CM will not accept it.

On that day the then chief minister NT Rama Rao was travelling in Khammam district and the lunch was not served properly and he was in a foul mood.

That was the time this news of resignation of the Higher Education minister was informed to him by his staff.

He immediately accepted the resignation and the Minister had to go.

It is told that minister subsequently remarked to his counterpart from Khammam that if only he had served proper lunch to NT Rama Rao his resignation would not have been accepted.

(Writer is former Chief Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh)