Gali Nagaraja

Hyderabad: The crisis in intermediate education marked by an unending trail of student suicides points an accusing finger at the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBoIE). A wave of protests by students, parents and civil society organisations in the last one week over the faulty method of evaluating academic performance of students resulting in death of 20 senior intermediate students calls for course-correction by the intermediate board.

The intermediate boards in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana suffer credibility crisis due to their failure to ensure a fool-proof mechanism in conducting examinations without leakage of question papers, poor evaluation and grading of marks. It became evident with the announcement of intermediate results by the Telangana board on April 18, fraught with blunders. Its role in selecting the software firm Globarena Technology Private Limited for the web-based applications to deal with admissions, pre-examination and post-examination processes comes under question in the backdrop of student suicides. The exercise involves the future of nearly 10 lakh students.

Quoting a performance certificate (Dated 08-09-2014) issued as its client by the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University-Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh over the rating of the software firm under question in executing the assignment, M Madhusudan Reddy, secretary of the Telangana Junior Colleges Lecturers Association, demanded that the board make public details of the contract awarded to Globarena Technology Private Limited. In the performance certificate, Reddy asserted, the JNTU-Kakinada said the software agency was never involved in pre- and post-examination web-based application activities, but only took up online evaluation of answer scripts for the academic year 2013-'14. The magnitude of operations at JNTU-K involves only a few thousand students, compared to the lakhs of students who appear for intermediate exams. 

Neerada Reddy Committee on suicides

The undivided Andhra Pradesh constituted an expert committee headed by Neerada Reddy in 2007 to study the factors leading to students' suicides in campuses and recommend remedial measures. Depicting the corporate colleges as “concentration camps” with students as captives, the committee observed that 17-18 study hours in a day and 10 exams in a month were the causes of stress resulting in campus suicides.

Either of the Boards of Intermediate Education in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, even after state bifurcation, failed to honour the 17 key recommendations of the Committee that speak of the hold of corporate colleges over the regulatory bodies.

“P Narayana, who runs a chain of Narayana colleges in both the states, is an influential minister holding municipal administration and urban development portfolio in Andhra Pradesh government. Narayana became a close relative of Human Resource Minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao after he married his daughter to Rao’s son. Can the intermediate boards dare to proceed against erring corporate college managements under such conditions?” asks Noor Ahmad, a former leader of Student Federation of India (SFI).   

Academics and experts frown upon the manner in which the intermediate board executes evaluation of answer scripts. Each evaluator gets 80 scripts a day which they have to finish within a span of eight working hours, leaving only four to five minutes for evaluating each answer script, including an hour of breaks in between the work. “It is humanly impossible to be accurate in assessing the performance of students under such conditions,” says educationist Chukka Ramaiah, doubting the standards of evaluators.   

A toothless regulator

The very objective behind the establishment of intermediate board is to regulate the colleges coming up in private and government sectors. The board is obligated to accord permissions to colleges after ensuring their compliance relating to infrastructure, safety measures and engagement of qualified faculty, among others, as prescribed by norms.

“It’s an open secret that all the corporate colleges are running in multi-storied apartments with no basic amenities like playground and proper ventilation. None of them has a lab facility enabling science students to perform practicals,” points out Maddhileti, president of the Telangana Vidyarthi Vedika.

Information obtained by Vedika under the Right to Information (RTI) Act in March, 2019 from the intermediate board revealed startling realities — out of 130 corporate colleges with 36,000 students, 76 are running without any permission in Telangana.

Maddhileti suspects the “invisible” hand of corporate colleges in the bungling with which the results were announced. All the students who committed suicide were from state-run colleges with poor background and those protesting at the board office for several days are also from the same colleges. Madhileti alleges that it is a pre-planned “operation” to kill the government colleges while helping corporate colleges flourish.    

Poor standards take heavy toll on students

The corporate education culture in Telugu states that focuses on helping students crack entrance tests to premier engineering institutes largely ignores conceptual learning and stresses on rote learning. 

Vaditya Nehru, a boy from Miriyalaguda in Telangana’s Nalgonda district, had secured a top rank in intermediate and the screening tests that helped him get into Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur. He committed suicide after failing to clear the first year exams in 2012. Nitin Kumar Reddy of Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh ended his life in a similar fashion for the same reasons the next year. Nitin had secured admission in the prestigious IIT-Madras with a descent score.

The tragic end of these two students points at the huge gap students experience at premier institutes, after being conditioned through modules based on rote learning developed by the intermediate boards with poor conceptual learning skills only to suit the commercial requirements of corporate colleges.

A study conducted by some professors from the state working in IITs revealed around 35 percent of students from the two Telugu states are failing to clear exams at the undergraduate level after having shone in the all-India level screening tests for admissions in the premier IITs.

After medical education went into the control of national eligibility-cum-entrance test (NEET), intermediate education is forced to completely focus on engineering education. The students with poor fundamentals in their intermediate education are taking admissions in engineering courses with a huge number of them ending up jobless.