The marathon arrangements made this time to conduct malpractice-free plus II examinations are praiseworthy.
Of all the education Ministers who worked under the Naveen Patnaik dispensation, the current one, Badrinarayan Patra, seems to be highly effective. It is because he was a college teacher prior to joining politics and knows the nitty-gritty.
Patra had courted controversy after serial leaks of question papers in western Odisha last year, putting a question mark on the fairness of the examinations and the transparency of the system that runs the entire gamut of affairs. Patra had to take the lion's share of the blame being at the helm of affairs.
Though subsequently stringent measures were taken to nab the culprits behind the question leaks, yet, except a few small fry, many officials, who have been making easy money for long years through under-the-table deals, are yet to be brought to book. Patra has the bitter experience of working in a private aided college in the State, the suffering of having to wait for long years, say 10 to 20, for getting grant and the mechanism adopted to run a college till Government grant is availed like running each academic session without lapses, keeping minimum student strength and making a desirable level of result in each year of examinations etc. He is not unaware of the highhandedness of the officials in the Council of Higher Secondary Examination (CHSE) office and in the universities. He knows pretty well that in order to ensure that the examinations are conducted fairly, problems at several levels have to be solved. The teachers in the college must get their fair salary; the institutions have to be self-reliant and the rot in the red tape must end.
Since maximum colleges in Odisha are non Government aided colleges, the most welcome thing that Patra did was to consider grant for the teachers. It is another matter that he could not regularize the services of the staff by paying them grant-in-aid instead of the block grant, but it is undeniable that by providing certain amount of salary, he made the staff more responsible and committed to their jobs, which went a long way in ensuring fairness in the examinations as hitherto the staff members in many unaided colleges allegedly used to aid and abet malpractice. Hope whichever Government comes after the next elections will take a leaf from Patra and ensure that the teachers and staff get fairer salary before being expected to extend better cooperation.
For the first time, Patra sought to maintain cleanness and probity in the examinations by roping in the district administration and police to help manage the affairs. The district Collectors and SPs were told to keep vigil over the whole process and provide safety and security to the examination materials and personnel.
He did another commendable thing by coining the idea for hub centres. Given the large number of examination centres, it was not feasible to provide security to the examination materials, especially question papers, everywhere earlier. So he created a limited number of hubs and assigned each hub a fixed number of examination centres. The hubs were fitted with CCTV cameras. Questions were kept in full security in the hubs and on the sechduled dates, the questions were provided by the hub to the constituent colleges where the examination centres were held. Further, the hub colleges were asked to deploy staff to oversee the conduct of the examinations in the centres. After the examinations were over, the answer scripts and related materials were carried back to the hubs. This resulted in preventing question leak. Necessary security arrangements were also made at the hubs as well as the examination centres to check untoward incident.
The Minister laid utmost stress on squad system. He pressed into service a multi-prong squad pattern to ensure that the students did not cheat. There were nodal, central and flying squads to swoop down on the centres and prevent malpractice. Currently, the examinations have been going on hassle free. Patra has to ensure that no corruption takes place during coding of the answer scripts, their valuation and publication of results.