Joint Entrance board website to get a facelift

Following instruction of the state information commission, West Bengal Joint Entrance Exam Board will overhaul their website putting in a lot of additional mandatory information.

After an organisation complaint that the board was charging extra money for showing answer scripts to examinees the hearing took place at the commission. Although the board got a clean chit from the commission as far as the complaint was concerned but it was noticed that's the board had not upload different information according to the RTI Act. In a suo motu move of the commission it has instructed the board to upload those.

Hearing had began after Collegiums of Assistant Headmasters and Assistant Headmistress complained to the commission against the board. Accordingly on May 22 commission head summoned representatives of the board. It was alleged that the board was charging Rs 500 from examinees which was in violation of rules. According to the norms no more than the money required to get a duplicate copy of the script should be charged. Furthermore it was found out that information regarding RTI was not uploaded on the board website.

Representing the board during the hearing was registrar-cum-state public information officer Dibyendu Kar. He said that for the past few years as soon as the the results were issued students were given their Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets. Those were also uploaded on the website which is why no one needed to get a duplicate OMR sheet. For how long the OMR sheet would be preserved has already been informed on the website.

According to the RTI Act, it was mandatory for any government website should upload certain information such as mission of the organisation, it works, names of the officials, contact address, who the Public Information Officer is and what is his designation. But the board’s website did not have these.

Officials of the board said the relevant information would soon be uploaded on the website but the allegation that the boat charges money for OMR sheets was unfounded.

The board has however conceded that earlier, before the process of uploading OMR sheet on the website was initiated, an amount of Rs 500 used to be charged from examinees as fees. Many students opted for it because they thought going to the RTI way was time consuming.

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