The Right to Information (RTI) activist and Transparency International (TI) member, Ajay Dube, continuing his tirade to strengthen the investigations in the infamous Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB) scam, has made new revelations.
Dube in a statement here on Thursday said that the documents obtained through RTI reveal that the then chairperson of the MPPEB Ranjana Choudhary soon after assuming office in 2010 made attempts to improve the quality of the exams conducted by the board and to make the process more secure suggested to adopt online examinations in place of offline OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) system.
Dube further said that Choudhary in a letter to Deepak Khandekar, the then principal secretary of the Chief Minister and Information and Technology Department, revealed that the agencies of Madhya Pradesh Government including CRISP, MAP IT, CEDMAP, MP Electronics Development Corporation (MPEDC) and the agencies of Government of India NICRII-MT Gwalior are not cooperating in efforts of doing examinations online. MPEDC only forwarded the other private firms proposals to her, she added.
He said that it is matter of investigation that who were those people that were not letting the efforts of senior IAS officer Choudhary get succeeded. Who stopped herIJ The question is important because it was the OMR sheets that were manipulated by the criminal elements to do the scam. Had the examination been done online then there was possibility that the scam would not have been such a bigger one, he added.
The then chairman MK Rai also made similar attempts of conducting online examinations because throughout the country mostly national examinations were being conducted online from 2005.The RTI activist said that the note sheet written by Choudhary also reveals that the MPPEB controller Pankaj Trivedi and SSA Nitin Mahindra were not taking her efforts for conducting online examinations seriously.