DC Edit | CBSE Mess: Govt Must Look For Root Of Graft

Prime Minister Narendra Modi often reminds his fellow citizens about the democratic dividend this country is set to harvest. Mr Modi is obviously referring to the fact that more than half of the Indian population is aged below 30, and a lion’s share of it is made of students. However, the government he leads and the agencies under it do not treat the student community in a way that they are assured of a bright future; instead they are subjected to untold miseries for no fault of theirs. But those who are responsible do not appear to acknowledge them; leave alone make honest attempts to fix them.

The leak of the question papers for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Neet) for admission to various medical courses in the country conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the serious complaints about the valuation of papers for the Class 12 examination conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Examination are the result of unacceptable lapses on the part of the government.

The NTA has been conducting various national tests for admission to educational courses for about a decade and there have been several instances when the agency has proved itself to be unequal to the task. The cancellation of the Neet examination for admission to undergraduate courses this year cannot be counted as a one off incident; it was only two years ago that such allegations had surfaced. It appears that the government did not take a thorough look into what went wrong and examined what corrective steps were to be taken.

There is no end to the complaints of the students and their parents about the discrepancies in the evaluation of answer papers of Class 12 students. India prides itself as a software powerhouse; it is shame that the authorities have not been able to come up with a solution at least after the trouble broke out. Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has now entrusted the job to IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur. It is a delayed decision, albeit a welcome one.

The two issues that are now making students chase elusive solutions are of the government’s own making. A national level entrance test for medical admissions was mooted by the Supreme Court after it came across irregularities in the tests state governments had been conducting. Now, the solution has become worse than the original problem. It is not that there are no national level entrance examinations in this country; it only shows that the NTA is not equipped to handle such a mammoth exercise. Its lethargy and callousness have forced the Supreme Court to point out that it has refused to learn from past mistakes and make amends. The CBSE revaluation issue is also the creation of an unprepared, unimaginative bureaucracy that did not have the wisdom to introduce a new system after ensuring that all the bugs are fixed.

The education minister has never appeared serious about the purpose of his ministry; it has completely lost the message the Prime Minister has been trying to communicate to the youth. Instead, it is busy searching for excuses to minimise its own failures. It must at least now run a thorough check of the system and see if corruption has taken root before things get out of hand.