During the 31 years it has been in power in West Bengal (pop. 80 million), the CPM (aka Communist Party of India-Marxist) dominated Left Front government has taken every care to run the state’s education system, from primary school to university postgraduation, to suit its ideological predilections. Therefore, the criterion for appointment of teachers and education administrators is not academic merit, but allegiance to the party. As a result, West Bengal’s once hallowed academic institutions — hitherto respected countrywide — have become synonymous with inefficiency and mediocrity.
Students suffer most, especially the brightest and best. Their plight was recently illustrated by the curious case of Pritam Rooj, a second year mathematics honours student of Presidency College, Kolkata, one of the few surviving centres of academic excellence in West Bengal. In paper V of his University of Calcutta (UCal) maths examination, Rooj was awarded an unexpected 28 percent. When he appealed to UCal for review, his score was increased to 32, the minimum pass mark. Suspecting foul play, Rooj asked UCal to show him the corrected answer script. UCal rejected his request on grounds that “university rules do not provide for showing answer scripts”. Dissatisfied, Rooj filed a writ petition in the Calcutta high court (Pritam Rooj vs. University of Calcutta and Others, W.P. no. 22176(W) of 2007).
In a widely appreciated judgement delivered on February 5, Chief Justice S.S. Nijjar and Justice Dipankar Dutta upheld the right of examination candidates to inspect their answer scripts. Invoking Article 19 of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression to every citizen, the court pronounced: “If inspection of answer scripts is denied to the examinee, the spirit of the Constitutional right to free expression and information may be lost. The knowledge-builder’s — the university’s — bid to perpetuate the draconian, elitist, one-sided right to know and judge and rule without being open to question or accountable to the examinee, cannot be encouraged. For a system to foster meaningful proliferation of knowledge, it must itself be crystal clear to its core.”
Following the court’s judgement, the state government’s education bureaucracy has gone into a tizzy. Dr. Mamata Ray, president of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Examination, declined to speak for the record as judicial implications of implementing the ruling are still under review by the school education department.
The secondary and higher secondary boards commandeer the services of around 70,000 school teachers to evaluate scripts of 1.1 million school leavers. “The quality of examiners recruited by CPM bosses in the districts is so poor that erratic marking and evaluation is the norm,” says a school teacher who is also an examiner.
Hasty, incompetent evaluation is the norm at university level as well. And given that UCal evaluates over 300,000 scripts annually, officials fear that the ratio decidendi of the February 5 judgement could lead to a flood of review applications resulting in additional work-load for the varsity’s administrative staff.
Meanwhile there is considerable speculation in academia whether the state government will appeal the high court’s judgement in the Supreme Court. With the high court having given UCal four weeks time to unearth and provide Rooj with his maths answer paper, academics in Kolkata — especially in UCal — are waiting with bated breath to learn whether Pritam Rooj’s maths paper was negligently or arbitrarily marked. If so, lazy days will be over.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)