3-member panel nails BIE for fiasco

Hyderabad: The state government appointed a three-member committee headed by Telangana State Technology Services (TSTS), Managing Director Venkateswara Rao who reportedly nailed the negligence on the part of the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) for keeping silent over the functioning of the Globarena Technologies Private Limited.

It may be mentioned here that Globarena has been hired by the TSBIE for extending pre and post examination services to the Board.

However, following the hue and cry raised over the serious lapse on the part of the Board in the declaration of the Intermediate Public Examination -2019 results the state government had appointed the three-member committee.

The committee members lead by Venkateswara Rao, Prof Vasan from BITS- Hyderabad, and Prof Nishant from IIT- Hyderabad had a preliminary round of interaction with the Board officials on Tuesday and the same was followed up along with the representatives of the company.

According to sources, the committee has scrutinised 100 and odd parameters that were used in the entire process of the pre and post examination services rendered by Globarena.

Speaking to The Hans India, sources said one of the two experts reportedly expressed shock over how the company could not properly handle even the first or basic stage of the examination process, besides, wondering as to what had made the Board remain silent, on the errors reported to its staff.

"As part of the process, the colleges login with a specific username and password given to them by the Board and upload the data of the students giving their names, date of birth, telephone number etc, in the MS Excel format.

The colleges are asked to make the total fee collected from the students through online transfer into the Board's account," he added.

The Board generates the hall ticket numbers on satisfying with the total payment from the college made vis-a- vis the number of students data uploaded in the MS Excel format on its website by the colleges.

A board official, privy to the investigations being conducted by the three-member committee, said: "It is a standard procedure to collect the data in a user-friendly format. In this case, the junior colleges have uploaded the data in the MS Excel format.

"In turn, the Globarena had to take the data in the same format and use a suitable programme to convert the same in a format adaptable to the software tool deployed to process the data.

"This is the crucial step. When the technical service provider successfully crosses this stage, then, it would help in making all other process related to the pre and post examination related modules to run smoothly," he added.

However, the committee members have found fault with the service provider for not able to handle the first stage itself.

"The conversion of data from the basic report format of MS Excel to a formant adoptable to the software deployed is not free from errors.

In turn, these errors continued when the process had been escalated to handle the examination payments, generation of hall tickets, allocation of examination centres etc." the sources said.

What is more intriguing is another committee member said was that whoever knows the advanced MS Excel with prescribed formulas can figure out such errors and correct the same at the preliminary stage itself.

But, for the reasons best known, top officials of the Board remained silent. This was among several other issues identified by the committee that played the role of a spoilsport in processing the Intermediate results, the sources said.