Inter results: ‘Punjab Group of Colleges orchestrated protests’

Gujranwala board chairman says protests meant to protect ‘booty mafia’.

LAHORE: The protests in Gujranwala over the intermediate exam results were orchestrated by the Punjab Group of Colleges (PGC) to protect the ‘booty mafia’ and make the new computerised results system look bad, the judicial commission investigating the results fiasco heard on Tuesday.

Gujranwala Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Chairman Mehar Bashir said that students from PGC colleges in Gujrat, Sialkot, Daska, and Mandi Bahauddin were bussed in to the city for the protest and they set fire to the board building. The judge said that the students who had burnt the BISE building were not those who had been affected by the errors in the results.

Bashir initially did not name the colleges he was referring to, but Justice Shahid Saeed insisted it be put on the record. “Are these colleges run by Mian Amir Mehmood?” the judge asked, referring to the former Lahore nazim. When Bashir said yes, the judge added: “I know they are very influential and they had been managing positions for their students even in university. They manage illegal marks for their students.”

Lahore Board of Revenue Member Haseeb Athar, a former secretary of the Higher Education Department, said that the department was a supervisory body but did not interfere in the BISEs’ operational matters. Asked about the appointment of Ahad Cheema, a grade-18 officer, as HED secretary, a grade-20 post, he said: “It is unusual.”

Athar said that computerisation minimised the involvement of officials in the tabulation and compilation of results and hence minimised the risk of fraud. He said the major errors in the results for the intermediate part 1 exams this year was likely down to human error. “The staff was not properly trained to handle the system,” he said.

Former Faisalabad BISE examination controller Malik Zafar Iqbal said that the computerised system was a step forward but it was imposed in haste. He said many students also struggled with the new system, such as in marking answers readable by the new computer software.

Bashir Ahmed, an assistant to the IT consultant who designed the new computerised results system for the eight boards in Punjab, said that putting the results system online cost Rs91,000 per month in web hosting over the last six months.

Muhammad Akram, a systems analyst at the Faisalabad BISE, said that the IT consultant, Dr Majid Naeem, had been imposed on the boards by the HED. He said the consultant handled criticism badly. “Jamshed, a programmer at the Sargodha BISE, had his overtime allowance deducted because he criticised the consultant,” he said. He said the optical reader software introduced by Naeem had “totally failed”.

Khalid Javed Khan Niazi, president of the BISEs Employees Union, said he had complained “at every forum” about Naeem, filing a petition before the Lahore High Court against his appointment and writing to the chief secretary in this regard. He said in the manual system, there was a check on the marking of papers in the form of internal examiners. He said there was no such check in the computerised system.

Niazi said the chairmen of the 8 BISEs had committed “criminal negligence” by not writing to high-ups to complain about Naeem. He said the consultant had even shut down the computer system for five days to demand a due payment. He said there would be further trouble when the re-tabulated results are released, as the papers were being marked again rather than just the scores re-tallied, which was against the rules.

Muhammad Aslam Gujjar, chairman of the BISEs Employees Union, said the Lahore board had bought machinery worth Rs1 million to print the marking page of the answer sheet, but they later had to be obtained from a private contractor.

He said earlier, the full answer sheet cost Rs10 to print; now it cost Rs10 per page to print.

The commission has summoned Ahad Cheema, who is now Lahore’s district coordination officer, for today. Naeem, who is in NAB custody, is to appear before the commission on November 22.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2011.