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| Parliamentary Panel seeks answers from NTA, CBSE | | | Early Times Report
NEW DELHI, June 7: A Parliamentary panel has asked the National Testing Agency (NTA) to define what constitutes a “paper leak” in its definition and whether any paper leaks have occurred in exams it conducted since 2018, sources said.
The panel’s questionnaire follows NTA officials’ appearance before it last week, where they contended that there was no paper leak from their system, claiming that some questions from a guess paper were in circulation, sources said.
The Parliamentary Committee for Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, headed by Congress member Digvijaya Singh, is investigating the NEET paper leak issue and the CBSE on-screen marking system (OSM) row, having summoned top government officials including those from the NTA and CBSE.
The committee has sought written answers from the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the NTA on the issues of OSM system and the NEET exam, respectively.
The panel asked the NTA whether it conducted any inquiry into the allegations of irregularities in the NEET-UG 2024 paper (outside of the CBI investigations). The panel also asked the NTA about its staff strength for the last three years and fresh recruitments made since 2022. It also demanded the annual report the NTA submitted to the Higher Education Department for the last three years.
It sought a detailed report on each of the Radhakrishnan Committee Report’s 101 recommendations and the action taken by the NTA on each, the sources said. The high-level committee of experts led by former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan was set up in June 2024 by the Centre to give recommendations for transparent, smooth and fair conduct of examinations through the NTA, including on its structure and functioning, reforms in the examination process and improvement in data security protocols.
While the CBSE must answer the panel’s questions by June 8, the NTA has been asked to submit written answers by June 10. Both agencies are yet to respond, the sources add.
The parliamentary panel also asked the CBSE about reported “changes” between the various Requests for Proposals (RFPs) issued for the OSM system and whether any background checks on COEMPT were conducted before awarding it the contract, the sources added.
The panel also sought to know from the CBSE whether it was aware that COEMPT EduTeck and/or its directors were previously associated with Globarena Technologies, whose evaluation software was faulted in the inquiry into the 2019 Telangana Intermediate results and how this was factored into the award decision, the sources claimed.
Seeking detailed answers from the CBSE, the parliamentary committee asked why the proviso disqualifying bidders with a past record of poor performance was removed in the third RFP for the OSM contract, the sources claimed. It also asked why the proviso prohibiting bidders who were previously blacklisted was “weakened” to exclude only currently blacklisted bidders in the third RFP and why the minimum company turnover for the bidder was specifically set at Rs 50 crore, they said.
The committee sought to know why the RFP provisions “changed” from favouring contractors with their own data centres to those using MeitYempaneled data centres, the sources said. Why was the provision for a robotic scanner “dropped and replaced with a generic provision (‘sufficient scanners’)”, and why the stipulation for contractors to scan answer papers without cutting the spine of the paper was removed, the panel has asked.
It also sought to know why the minimum scanning resolution desired by CBSE in its RFP was reduced from 300 DPI to 200 DPI, according to sources. The panel also asked why the criteria requiring experience handling large projects (involving at least 5 lakh students per project) was “dropped” in favour of a criterion allowing cumulative answer-book volume across multiple projects, the sources said.
The sources said the panel had earlier asked the CBSE to share documents about February 2025, May 2025 and August 2025 RFPs issued for the OSM system, which the CBSE has not complied with.
The panel also asked the CBSE to share the action taken on the report of the observers of the OSM dry run and whether the Board shared and/or discussed the observers’ report with the Ministry of Education. |
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