Waking up to the dangers of having sensitive data of its vast student base on a private website, Bangalore University (BU) is finally getting all that data on its own website. BU had outsourced maintenance and publishing of such data, including soft copies of marks cards of lakhs of students, to a private party.
A private company is managing the website that hosts, among other things, timetables of BU exams, counselling details and other important notifications. The contract with the company will end in March 2016.
Questions were raised within the varsity about the decision to outsource such work. “What happens once the contract expires? Will students continue to have access to their marks cards,” asked a BU lecturer.
Students usually require access to soft copies of their marks cards. Every year, BU gives out over two lakh marks cards to students enrolled in undergraduate and postgraduate disciplines, freshers and repeaters.
BU Registrar (Evaluation) Ningegowda K.N. acknowledged the risk in the present arrangement. “The contract had been signed on a tenure basis under the regime of the previous registrar. But we realised that this is not tenable after the three-year contract ends. We would not like to give access to such data to private agencies,” he said. BU is now centralising the system to bring all information and data onto its own website.
“All confidential data will now be in the Bangalore University website. Optical fibre cable networking is being set up in the Jnanabharathi campus. We are planning to introduce passwords for students, which will be an improvised version of the QR code that marks cards now have,” Prof. Ningegowda said.
