Blame shoddy administration for CBSE paper leak
Lack of experience, complacency and failure of the top brass to plug the loopholes in the administration led to the CBSE question paper leak.
Mindless changes in the overall conduct of an examination which is taken by more than 20 lakh students every year, have brought a bad name to the country’s most prestigious examination board.
Top CBSE officials failed to keep in safe custody the question papers that were stored in the highly vulnerable cooperative banks well known for their very fragile security setups, and therefore prone to all kinds of irregularities. In some places, even local post offices were used for safekeeping.
Significantly, in the past, question papers were necessarily kept in the strongrooms of scheduled nationalised banks. It was only recently that CBSE chose to entrust cooperative banks with this massive responsibility.
Indiscriminate selection of examination centres was also responsible for the loose grip over the question papers' security. With the increasing demand for the CBSE education pattern, which is fast becoming the preferred choice of schools and students in different parts of the country, educational institutions were coming up in many remote areas where scheduled banks do not have branches and, therefore, question papers had to be stored in post offices.
| Incidentally, the board secretary, from the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), is a rank outsider. (Photo credit: India Today) |
CBSE’s decision to do away with the old practice of preparing multiple sets of question papers has also proved detrimental for the entire system. Under that arrangement, different sets of question papers were made for different regions in the country. Hence, it was widely felt that if the earlier system had been allowed to continue, the leak would have remained limited to a particular region. That would also have made it easier for the board to hold the re-examination in the region where the malpractice was first reported from.
Three years ago, the Union human resource development ministry had decided to do away with yet another tradition - of selecting educationists as CBSE chiefs. Instead, IAS officers began to be handpicked for the job. The incumbent chief is the third such officer in succession and happens to be a bureaucrat from the blue-eyed Gujarat cadre. Incidentally, the board secretary, from the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), is a rank outsider.
It is alleged that under the current dispensation, selections to key positions, particularly in the field of education, are made on extraneous considerations like political connections or ideological leanings.
Experts who have been in the know of CBSE's traditions feel that some common sense could have saved the situation from taking such a disastrous turn that has led to even the integrity of the board being questioned besides giving sleepless nights to 20 lakh students who are now compelled to take the examination again.
Former CBSE chairman Ashok Ganguly told this scribe in Lucknow: “It is time that the CBSE top brass does a rethink and reverts to some of the old systems, otherwise the safety and security of question papers could turn into a perennial problem.”
He felt that “we should not ignore the fact that both classes 10 and 12 are extremely crucial stages in the academic career of every student’s life; therefore, such issues should not be taken lightly”.
Ganguly, who headed the board from 2000 to 2008 - a record tenure – is strongly of the view that the multiple question paper sets system was more foolproof and pragmatic. He wonders why at all CBSE chose to do away with the system, which had been adopted by several states where it did bring qualitative difference to school examinations.
The former CBSE chief too feels that the earlier system would have made it simpler for the board to identify the location of the leak.
Ganguly, who was responsible for introducing several reforms in the CBSE examination system during his long stint, feels that some of those well-thought-out and objective reforms have been undone by the current regime.