Hard-pressed, board resorts to outsourcing

DNA: Pune: Wednesday, June 13, 2012.

Outsourcing is the buzzword at the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE), which is facing severe manpower crunch and still declaring the secondary school certificate (SSC) results early.

To top it all, the state board is also dealing with a flood of RTI applications seeking copies of answer sheets for Higher School Certificate (HSC) examinations.

The board is short-staffed as there have been no recruitments in the last five years.

Admitting the fact that among the nine divisions of the board, only two divisions have divisional chairmen and secretaries, board chairperson Sarjerao Jadhav said, “We are pursuing the matter of recruitment with the state government. We are short-staffed by 30% and are managing the work by outsourcing people. But we cannot involve these people in taking important policy decisions, which delays our various administrative works.”

Despite the crunch, we are declaring the SSC results early, he added. Interestingly, nine boards have received some 9,753 applications under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, for gaining access to photocopies of answer sheets for standard XII. Over 13 lakh students had appeared for the exam for which the online results were declared on May 25.

He said, “The Pune division does not have a full time chairman and secretary, while Kolhapur has no chairman. Similarly, the Konkan division does not have chairman and secretary, and Mumbai does not have a chairman, a joint secretary and an assistant secretary, while Nashik lacks a full time chairman. Amravati does not have a secretary and Aurangabad has no chairman. Only Latur and Nagpur are the division boards where we have full time chairmen and secretaries.”

"The real challenge for us is to give the photocopies of answer sheets to students as with less staff and Unicode system, it is difficult for us to carry out this mammoth task," he added.

“We will first have to convert the Unicode in numbers and then send it to the respective divisions. Then the numbers will be tallied with the shelf numbers of other districts, talukas and the city and then the answer sheets will be taken out. After that the answer sheets will be checked thoroughly with the help of the moderator,” he said.