DC Edit | CBSE: Order Judicial Inquiry

The decision of the Union government to shunt out the chairman and secretary of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and replace them with a fresh pair of IAS officers is a measure that is too little too late vis-à-vis the harm wrought by the actions of the CBSE authorities on the student community. The setting up of a panel headed by a retired IAS officer to investigate into the lapses and come up with suggestions to remedy the situation, too, falls woefully short when it comes to restoring the confidence of the people.

It is now clear that the CBSE had ventured into introducing a major reform in the examination system with little or no preparation. Every step in the complex process was handled with callousness, not care. That the selection of the agency to roll out onscreen marking would not follow prudential norms was already evident from the fact that the chosen one in an earlier avatar had made a bigger mess of the Class 10 examination in Telangana in 2019. There was no pilot project to test the efficiency of the new process. There was none to address the issues raised by students after declaration of the results either.

Taken together, it points to the total collapse of systems at the operational and supervisory levels in one of the critical Central agencies. Yet the political executive accountable to the people for its running, represented by Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, was nowhere to be seen. He was also absent when the paper leaks at the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for undergraduate medical courses and the Common University Entrance Test irregularities were uncovered. If the government feels responsible to the young people of this country, then it should sack Mr Pradhan and order a judicial inquiry aided by a panel of educationists and technological experts into the whole mess. The team must come up with solutions, too, so that a further recurrence does not occur. Anything short of it is nothing but hogwash.