KOCHI: The four-member committee that probed the SSLC result fiasco submitted its report over a week ago, but the government has shied away from making it public owing to the inconvenient questions that it may face on the issue.
The committee is understood to have come down heavily on the Pareeksha Bhavan which conducted the process, and found fault with data entry operators, teachers and officers who supervised and verified the entries.
The committee headed by general education additional chief secretary V.S. Senthil and comprising director of public instruction (DPI) in-charge Johns V. John, Kerala state IT Mission director K.Mohammed Y. Safirulla and Kerala university bio-informatics department head Achuth Sankar S. Nair has not found any major flaw on the part of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) which prepared the software for the result declaration this year.
The committee has made several recommendations to make the system foolproof in the coming years. The committee’s several observations have made it difficult for the state government to explain its position vis-a-vis the fiasco which is one reason why it is shying away from making the report public.
Pareeksha Bhavan secretary M.I. Sukumaran and the systems manager were not professionally equipped to manage the process which was functioning without fault till last year.
The inept handling of the technical side was by a ‘vastly inexperienced’ Plus-Two teacher with an MCA degree who was appointed system manager in the midst of the process. The SSLC technical wing at Pareeksha Bhavan was headless for a few months prior to that.
The printed forms used were error-prone. It was also found that double entry of marks to ensure accuracy was managed in a haphazard manner by many teachers resulting in errors.
The committee also found fault in the data entry forms comprising the personal details of students and their marks.
The committee did not find any fault with the NIC as it was forced into time constraints in developing the software and making last-minute changes.
One such instance was that of giving moderation which was orally intimated just before the declaration of results. Pareeksha Bhavan also failed to test the new software developed by the NIC.
Moreover, it was pointed out that the NIC had enough experience in this field as it had already managed the Kerala Higher Secondary result declaration process.
