HYDERABAD: Despite Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) claiming repeatedly that the technical glitches in its web portal have been fixed, college managements allege not only the glitches persist, they are capable of disrupting the academic year of over 12 lakh students.
The BIE website is currently unable to generate e-challans after the payment of examination fee by a student. As a result there is no account of the number of students who have paid the fee and who have not. What is worse is the solution proposed by the Board for the discrepancy resulting from the situation.
If, after the payment is done and the website does not reflect the same, the colleges have been asked to make the due payment from their own pockets. The board will refund the money later on. The problem lies with bigger colleges with larger number of students who will end up paying lakhs at a time for a technical glitch in the payment system.
And instead of owning up to the problem the board is seemingly busy fiddling with other data to save grace. Earlier this week, the Board said only 95 colleges had reported of discrepancies while it was soon found out that at least 3,000 colleges face the issue.
“Never have we ever faced such a problem in 30 years with the Board. We are very concerned what will happen now,” said the principal of a private junior college in SR Nagar. Sharing the opinion of many, including members of the board, the principal went on to allege that the private company given the contract to design the website was incompetent. “There needs to be a high-level inquiry into the matter as to how a company without experience to deal with such a huge amount of data was given the contract,” said the principal of a private junior college in SR Nagar.
“The problem is that the company did not have requisite experience to deal with the huge volume of data the Board had. Without carrying out any testing and scrutiny of their ability they were given the contract and now it is all messed up. Data collection process that should have been over by August will probably begin all over again now but with the paucity of time one wonders what will become of the fate of 12 lakh students,” said P Madhusudhan Reddy, president, Telangana Government Junior Lecturers Association.
Meanwhile, Laxma Reddy, president of Association for Strengthening Private Initiative in Rural Education (Aspire) is hopeful that students will not be to put to any disadvantage.“The Board will rectify things. It is already resolving the technical issues of several colleges that have approached it individually,” he said.
Online registration for NEET 2019 commences
The online registration for NEET 2019, for admission into MBBS and BDS courses in MCI approved colleges, commenced from Thursday, as per a notification released by the National Testing Agency. Late date for the submission of the application forms is November 30. An examination fee of `1400 will have to be paid for the general category, `750 for SC/ST/ Pwd/Transgender categories. The last date to pay the fees is December 1. Any online corrections in the application form can be made in the period between January 14-31. The examination will be conducted on May 5 as per the directives of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Medical Council and Dental Council of India.Results will be declared on June 5