The Tamil Nadu Private Colleges Employees Union (TNPCEU) has flayed what it termed as “double standards” adopted by the State Government in dealing with malpractices in examinations conducted by the Teachers’ Recruitment Board (TRB) and the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC).
The TNPCEU on Monday sought to know why the TRB was allowed by the government to issue a fresh notification after the detection of malpractices by 196 candidates in the exam conducted during 2017 for 1.33 lakh candidates (out of 1.7 lakh applicants), while permitting the TNPSC to go ahead with the process of recruitment for the rest of the applicants after imposing a life ban on the 99 candidates who had indulged in malpractices.
Also, the TRB was allowed to conduct its own enquiry while in the case of the malpractices detected in the TNPSC Group IV 2 A exam, the CB CID was entrusted with the task of investigation. In both cases, the malpractices had been committed through tampering of the OMR sheets, K.N. Karthick, founder of TNPCEU said.
Talking to mediapersons in Tiruchi, he said it was is only proper that the issue was resolved by TRB through a similar approach of banning the 196 candidates and conducting certificate verification for the others who had cleared the exam through proper means to fill the 1,058 vacancies.
Citing information sourced through the Right to Information Act, Mr. Karthik said there were a total of 1,450 vacancies to be filled and that the fresh process of recruitment could be confined to the remaining vacancies.
Ignoring the interests of those who had passed the TRB exam already through just means and necessitating their fresh application for the recruitment process was unreasonable. The TRB, he said, had even “flouted” an undertaking it had given in the Madras High Court that no money will be collected again from applicants who had already written the exam.
The requirement specified in the fresh notification for mandatory submission of experience and conduct certificates was impractical. “Those who source and submit fake certificates will have their way while others who are in the employment of private institutions will be at a great disadvantage to get the certificates at short notice,” he said, adding that, instead, the experience certificate and conduct certificate could be allowed to be produced at the time of certificate verification.
Moreover, the TRB has to prove its trustworthiness by determining the cause for the malpractice before embarking on a new method of recruitment process through the online application process and seeking to conduct computer-based exams in multiple sessions. “There are apprehensions about ambiguity in the concept of normalisation of scores,” Mr. Karthik said.