Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | A ‘Performance Audit’ Of NTA By CAG Is Essential Amid Edu Mess
It looks like the government is keen to clean up the place as quietly and as secretively as possible. Before Mr Pradhan quit, the ministry dismissed 47 officials of various ranks in the NTA in a peremptory manner
It was natural that all fingers pointed, and rightly so, at education minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Now that he has stepped down, the real issue is what went wrong with the National Testing Agency (NTA), that conducts all kinds of examinations for all kinds of jobs, from that of entry into the Allahabad high court and Delhi high court, medical colleges and the Indian Space Research Organisation, and more, including the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (Neet). As there have been no problems with umpteen tests that NTA seems to conduct day in and day out, the focus is on Neet, because it is here that paper leaks are happening time and again.
It looks like the government is keen to clean up the place as quietly and as secretively as possible. Before Mr Pradhan quit, the ministry dismissed 47 officials of various ranks in the NTA in a peremptory manner. They have been given marching orders, and it was made known that they will face legal and criminal action for their acts of omission and commission. The rot in the system is not with these 47 officials but with NTA’s organisational structure and the information systems that is
the base of the data that the dismissed people could misuse with impunity. The public has a right to know what went wrong that the test papers got leaked, and what is the involvement of these 47 employees. The government can say with all the furtiveness that it is capable of that there was an internal inquiry and it is on the evidence of wrongdoing that emerged that the dismissals were ordered. But the government has not disclosed anything about an internal inquiry, which is a matter of fairness with regard to the employees and about the modus operandi of the leakage of the test papers. If the government wants to take the issue to the courts, it must have evidence for the prosecution in place. Of course, it will then emerge into the public domain.
The announcement about fresh recruitments being made to the NTA to replace the system that has gone wrong gives some picture of the deeply faulty mode of the agency. It has now been declared that recruitment will be for four contractual positions of general managers and for 16 young professionals who have not cleared the UPSC examinations who will be the support team for the four general managers. It has not been specified whether the general managers will be from the private sector, those with degrees in business management, those equipped with technical knowhow in matters like cyber security.
There is no hint as to the new people being recruited in place of the 47 who have been thrown out involved a restructuring of the NTA, and in what manner. What the people need to know is the actual points of malfunctioning of the testing system. Either government has carried out an internal assessment and it is recruiting the new team based on what they have learnt about the loopholes in the NTA’s old structure, or is doing it in a hurry to hide the rickety system. There are any number of too-clever-by-half technical experts who thinks all problems can be fixed through computerisation. This government led by a technically naïve Prime Minister believes in the simplistic solution of computerisation. The new buzzword, of course, is AI, and it will be said that AI will clear all the bugs in the system. On the face of it, the paper leaks are not due to failure of the system and the data banks. It is the human beings who operate the system who can bend the system. The idea that there will be a foolproof way to keep out the human operators managing the data flow is nothing short of foolishness.
What is needed to stem the rot in the exam system across the board is to fix responsibility of the people who manage the system. The dismissal of the 47 people, which implies their involvement in the criminal use of the test papers, reveals where the solutions are to be found: in the people, and not in the computers. The more systems are managed by smart machines, that is smart computers, the less scope there is for finding fault with the 47 dismissed staff or even with minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Responsibility has to lie with the staff and the person at the top -- the minister in question. There should be no room for anyone to shrug shoulders and walk off.
The Neet scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot of malfunctioning in the government that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers have been running for the last 12 years. There has not been enough scrutiny of the workings of the government. The loud protestations by Mr Modi and his ministers is not a testament of efficient governance but distracting attention from the rot that is hidden from public view. The Opposition parties have been lazy. They have not demanded the reports by the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of various ministries, departments and agencies. It is something the BJP had done when it was in Opposition and it managed to nail, fairly and unfairly, the administrative lapses of the Manmohan Singh government from 2004 to 2014. It is the huge commotion created by tens of thousands of young people across the country that brought the theft and burglary of Neet test papers to light. The old dictum -- eternal vigilance is the price of liberty -- has never been truer than in the case of the Narendra Modi government, with its deafening boasts of its own achievements in order to hide its terrible failures.
