Quality control

The National Testing Service (NTS) was in the past held up as a rare example of probity in a land where dishonesty and corruption prevail — but not anymore. It is the organisation that conducts the tests for admission to a range of educational institutions and appointments to posts in government organisations. Today, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has announced that it was speeding up investigations into NTS. It is investigating allegations of corruption, the leaking of question papers and other matters that have been referred to it. It must be noted that NAB has itself used NTS for appointment to its own posts and may have questions to answer of itself dependent on the outcome of any inquiry. Additionally, NAB wants to know if NTS is compliant with the directives of the Supreme Court that it should reduce by at least half the amount they charge candidates — with the strong suspicion that it is not being to the fore.

For an organisation supposedly at the cutting edge and portrayed as a paragon there are some surprising deficits associated with NTS. Part of the investigation is concerned with why it is that NTS has failed to devise a ‘foolproof, transparent and merit based examination system’. Considering that testing and examinations are supposedly the core business, the raison d’être, of NTS, this is both surprising and reprehensible, reflecting poorly on those that created the agency in the first place. Institutional deficits such as this build corruption and inefficiency into the system, every system that generalises to the wider population and every candidate that has been through the NTS mill.

Pakistan suffers from an ever-extending range of self-inflicted wounds that sap the marrow from the bones of the state. All of them are watched from outside by a world puzzled and occasionally horrified at what it sees. The foreign media in particular are ever more finely focused, and the Faizabad debacle has narrowed their focus still further. There is little that we can hold up as an example of best practice or good governance to countervail our critics — and that little has just got a little smaller.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 30^th, 2017.

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