MHRD will go all out to prevent further leaks: Swarup

Kolkata: Secretary of department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) Anil Swarup said on Monday that the department will use technology to the hilt to prevent any further leakage of question papers, in Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or similar examinations.

At the same time, he made it clear that police probe in the matter has ruled out the involvement of any CBSE official in the leak.

"The report of the committee constituted by the MHRD department will come by Monday or Tuesday, which will not only examine the ways on how the leakage took place, but will also suggest measures on how to prevent such incidents in future. We will use technology to the best of our abilities to address the issue," Swarup said at an interactive session on "Creating a robust, just, reliable and student-friendly public examination system in India" at Merchants' Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The MHRD secretary, however, maintained that CBSE is one of the most credible education systems, for which the Supreme Court has assigned the responsibility upon it to conduct the NEET examinations.

It may be mentioned that the ministry has been in the eye of the storm over the leakage of class X Mathematics and class XII Economics question papers of CBSE examinations held in March.

Responding to a number of suggestions from top institutions in the city for creating a robust student-friendly education system in CBSE, he said that the board, which has 20,000-odd schools and colleges under its aegis, cannot change the system overnight.

He suggested to the chambers to set up a separate board with a handful of odd schools and try to implement the suggestions that have come up.

"We allow any private entity to set up a board. Why don't you set up a society or a board and implement such suggestions at the ground level in a handful of schools that will come under this board? Giving suggestions is one thing and doing it in reality is a different proposition altogether," the MHRD secretary said.

He retorted immediately when Mukta Nain, director of Birla High Schools in Kolkata, during her address said that as per media reports, there has been an involvement of CBSE officials in the leakage.

"My request is that nobody should distort facts, because the moment you do so, the public assumption changes. There is no perfect education system anywhere in the world. We have to understand the limitations of the system and then come up with solutions," Swarup said.

He cautioned against blindly adopting foreign tenets in the country's education policy and said that foreign ideas must be customised for Indian conditions.