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Monday Musings: A tale of exam with unending woes
For years, the Maharashtra public health department has been facing an issue of a shortage of staff. When the issue has taken a centre stage during the Covid-19 pandemic, state health minister Rajesh Tope assured of filing up all posts at the earliest to tackle the situation and so the exams are scheduled on October 24 and 31
PUNE A crucial exam to fill up 6,200 posts for which over eight lakh job aspirants have applied. The exam gets cancelled at the eleventh hour in the first attempt – and when it is rescheduled, aspirants face issues that threaten to bar them from attending it.
This is a tale of an exam to fill up vacant positions in Maharashtra’s public health department that will help the government prepare for a potential surge in Covid-19 cases anticipated by experts after Diwali. It also raises doubt whether the government should be outsourcing a crucial exercise such as an exam to a private agency?
The posts to be filled are under Class C and D categories and pertain to staff nurses, auxiliary nursing midwives, pharmacists, laboratory technicians, X-Ray technicians, laboratory assistants and others such as ward boys and supporting staff.
For years, the state public health department has been facing an issue of a shortage of staff. When the issue has taken a centre stage during the Covid-19 pandemic, state health minister Rajesh Tope assured of filing up all posts at the earliest to tackle the situation emerging due to deadly virus that has so far claimed at least 1.40 lakh lives with 65.89 lakh suffering from it.
Instead of winning praise to initiate massive exercises to fill up a large number of posts, the government has come under fire from aspirants for the mess it has created. But the lessons seem to have not been learnt.
For the second time within three weeks, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government has faced an embarrassing situation as several aspirants have now complained about the allocation of multiple centres (in different cities) for the same paper on the same day for the Maharashtra public health department exam scheduled on October 24 and 31.
The government has outsourced the exam process to Nyasa Communication Private Limited (NCPL), which was previously too blamed for the fiasco as the government had to cancel the exam the first time at the eleventh hour owing to lack of preparations during the last week of September 2021.
Within government, there’s a blame game and Tope is already pointing fingers at the IT department, which comes under none other than Thackeray with Satej Patil being a junior minister. Patil is so far silent while Thackeray has sought to examine credentials of Uttar Pradesh-based firm, which many say does not have the expertise to hold such exercise. Tope has earlier clarified that the health department has a limited role in setting up question papers. The rest of the preparations that include exam centres, hall tickets, seating arrangement, exam supervisor, their training among others was with the outsourced firm with support from the information technology (IT) department.
When governments outsource work related to conducting exams to private agencies, the aim is to hold such exercise smoothly, maintain integrity, and ensure fair evaluation without any interference.
In this case, neither of the three objectives are being achieved. To hold exams at this level has two parts – first is to fairness at the highest level and second is a logistical part. According to Nyasa executives, it has ‘large’ experience and ‘impeccable record’ of holding exams though it has not reflected in its initial conduct.
Last month the firm informed the government at the last moment that they won’t be able to complete the preparations and applicants will have to face difficulties during examinations, those in the establishment had no option but to postpone exams for a few days as there were many discrepancies in the seating arrangement, training of invigilators among others.
NCPL, as the government has claimed after facing ire, is part of a list of empanelled firms prepared by the state IT department. As per the procedure, the departments will have to select the firms only from the empanelled list of firms for holding recruitment examinations.
Despite the embarrassment, the government continued the same agency to hold the exam.
The least the government can do is remove the firm from its list and investigate the matter followed by action as promised by Tope earlier.
