Why Play With The Future Of Our Children? Time For Some Accountability

Posted: March 9, 2019

‘Be a Responsible Citizen’ is a statement that is often seen and heard. Indeed it is important that citizens be responsible for simple things like clean surroundings, following traffic rules, going green and saving the environment and so on. Does the onus of the being a responsible lie only with the citizens? What happens when Government agencies don’t take their responsibilities seriously?

Goof ups galore!

My grievance here is about the education department and its so-called efficient staff. In the HSC exams currently being conducted in Maharashtra, two key papers for commerce students had goof-ups.

During the Maths paper, despite there being a question that involved using graph papers, the students were not provided with the same. On top of it, at many centers, the papers were collected half an hour before the stipulated time i.e. at 1330hrs instead of 1400hrs.

Similarly, a typing error in the Bookkeeping paper caused a lot of anxiety and loss of time among students. A sum for 10 marks which had a particular figure in the ‘Assets’ column was unclear which led to confusion whether the amount was 76000 or 16000 or 6000. Thereby the balance sheet could not be tallied well and led to children losing their precious time. This had a cascading effect while solving the other questions too.

Year on year, goof-ups in the question papers is a common factor. Last year too, there were four printing errors in the Chemistry paper, including something that was asked out of the syllabus. Although later it was decided that the children would be getting some bonus marks for it.

Children subjected to undue stress

Do we realize the undue stress that the children are subjected to? After the number of hours, days and months that the children spend in preparing for the highly blown out of proportion ‘Board exams’, they are left further flustered with such incidences. The parents of children from lower strata of the society toil day and night to pay for the tuition and college fees of their children while the education department authorities behave in such a callous way.

Is there any accountability for the staff involved in all this? Or maybe this question is irrelevant because if there was some sort of accountability, such goof-ups wouldn’t happen so frequently. Unless they want us to accept the fact that such goof-ups are no big deal. I wonder if capable and efficient people are being given the concerned jobs. In any case, how much capacity does one need to be to know that the papers are being collected at 1330hrs instead of 1400hrs, depriving the children to answer probably a good 10 mark question?

Need for higher accountability

When it is time to ask for rights, the Government agencies are more than happy to hold the citizens at ransom for getting their demands met be it letting garbage stink on the roads of the city or threatening to stop banking activities.

If such goof-ups would occur in private firms, the people concerned would be terminated or given a warning letter that would be placed in their personal files thereby hampering their appraisals and chances of promotion, if any. But in these Government agencies, it is appalling to witness such a lackadaisical attitude towards the future of our children and lack of awareness too thereof. There is no guarantee that there will be no such cases in the coming years as well.

As it is we live in a society, where responsibilities are not taken seriously. Such instances will not create Responsible Citizens; it will only result in further more careless individuals. Either the authorities deserve to pay better attention while setting the papers or conducting examinations or the children have to just take this in their stride.

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