Six BISEs adrift while exams near

Exam boards in several districts lack chairmen

LAHORE:

The boards of intermediate and secondary education in six districts of Punjab are functioning without permanent chairmen and other top administrative officers, The Express Tribune has learnt.

As a makeshift arrangement, the commissioners concerned have been assigned the additional task of looking after these boards as their interim heads.

In this vacuum in the top hierarchy of these boards, the mid-level administration officials have been wondering how matriculation examinations in these six towns would be held.

The boards of intermediate and secondary education in Sargodha, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan and Faisalabad have had no permanent chairmen or secretaries or controller of examinations for the last eight months.

Neither the PTI nor the PML-N governments appointed regular chairmen and other officials for the boards in question while the current interim setup has banned appointments and transfers in the province.

Matric exams in the province are scheduled to be held in six weeks’ time.

What would happen if these six districts could not conduct matric exams due to the absence of permanent chairmen?

A senior official of the Punjab Higher Education Department said on condition of anonymity that the annual matric exams were only one-and-half months away.

The official said that nearly two million candidates appeared in matric exams in Punjab every year, which made these exams the biggest of all exams in the province, considering the number of candidates that appeared in them.

That made the task of those responsible for conducting these exams doubly more difficult.

No wonder, then, that the doubts raised about the conduct of these exams in the best possible manner in the six districts whose board had no permanent chairman needed to be taken seriously, said the official.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2023.