BHAWANIPATNA: At a time when the Council of Higher Secondary Education is air-conditioning Plus Two evaluation centres across the State for comfort of evaluators who work for at least six hours a day, an 8 feet by 15 feet room with just one window has been earmarked as the digital evaluation centre in Bhawanipatna.
The centre has come up at Crown IT & Management Centre in the busy Mahavirpada here. It is attached to Government Autonomous College which is the zonal evaluation centre for Plus Two answer sheets in Kalahandi district. While manual correction of answer sheets is being done in the autonomous college, re-evaluation is being done in the computer lab of the private computer training centre.
Neither does it have space to accommodate 67 evaluators who will digitally evaluate at least 20 objective papers and 15 subjective papers daily nor basic facilities for them like drinking water and washrooms.
What it has is eight fans, which do not function properly due to low voltage. Although re-evaluation in the centre started on April 8, only five per cent of the papers have been evaluated so far in the absence of a conducive environment.
In the congested room, the evaluators are forced to sit in two rows with little space to even move while checking the answer sheets. With the temperature in the town hovering around 42 degree Celsius, the barely ventilated room leaves little space for the evaluators to breathe easy. For 30 computers, there is only one UPS. With no back-up facility, they face a harrowing time everyday.
What has been worrying the evaluators is total absence of security arrangement at the centre. They say that any person can enter the centre and threaten them.
On April 3, after visiting the proposed centre, Principal of the Autonomous College wrote to the Controller of Examinations, CHSE, informing them about the unsuitability of the centre.
However, the matter has not been taken into consideration. On April 8, the examiners attached to the re-evaluation centre also wrote to the Controller of Examinations and raised their objection after experiencing the hazard.
In their letter, they alleged that the centre is unsuitable for valuation work. They cited congested space, insufficient software back-up facility and lack of infrastructure leave alone a decent washroom and drinking water facility. This letter too was not taken seriously by the CHSE, forcing the evaluators to work under trying conditions.