Chennai: Even six months after unearthing a major scam in the recruitment of polytechnic teachers, the Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) was not revamped with additional staff and adequate facilities to set up an infallible recruitment system.
Despite recruiting thousands of teachers every year, the Teachers Recruitment Board is facing an acute shortage of staff where the large recruitment also handled by only a few staff members.
The absence of technical knowledge has led to one of the major scams. But, the state government has not initiated any action to establish a full-fledged technical wing in TRB to do works like printing and supply of OMR sheets, scanning of OMR answer sheets, data processing and data management in-house.
Sources said, “The board has now recruited a programming officer to verify all the data processed by the contracted company. Now, it has evolved a standard operating procedure (SOP) for recruitment which will fix the responsibility for any lapse and procedures to handle the confidential matters.”
“The board will have full control over the data and at every stage, it will be double checked for any manipulation to rule out irregularities,” sources added.
TRB also bought two scanning machines. “The scanning needs the programming and other technical expertise. This works needs to be outsourced,” they pointed. Despite finding that employees of the private company are the root cause for polytechnic lecturers’ recruitment scam, the board has again entered into an agreement with another company to handle the technical aspects of the recruitment.
But, the teacher aspirants urged the government to spend money to make the recruitment process foolproof and to empower it to undertake all confidential process in-house.
“Entrusting the private companies will likely lead to further manipulations. The board should have total control of the recruitment process by having all facilities and expertise in-house,” teacher aspirants demanded
Educationist Prince Gajendrababu said, “The state government has to ensure that quality teachers are being selected for teacher posts. Otherwise, a generation will lose interest in teaching.”
