Students and activists have demanded that Mumbai University (MU) not release further payments to the controversial digital evaluation firm, MeritTrac that had introduced and handles the On-Screen Marking System of the MU.
The issue generated much heat on Friday following a leak of a MU sanction letter showing ₹30 lakh being sanctioned to MeritTrac. As per the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the MU and MeritTrac, the latter was to receive ₹3.6 crore, of which the MU has already paid up ₹1.18 crores. This created furore among the students and activists who had been fighting against MeritTrac’s shoddy implementation of the OnScreen Assessment Marking system. The students demanded that instead of seeking damages from the company, MU was quietly paying them up.
‘Wasting fee money’
“A major chunk of the MU’s funds comes from students’ fees. Instead of seeking damages, why is the fee money being used to pay Merit Trac? Also, many legislators criticised the Mumbai University in Assembly during the current winter session. Yet, even before the Assembly session could get over, the University is back to paying them,” said Abhishek Bhatt, advocate, who has sought ₹10 lakh as damages from the MU for the exam assessment fiasco in a petition to the High Court.
Student activist Akash Vedak questioned how the MU could schedule payments, when a three-member panel is looking into its role in the exam fiasco. “Students have still not been compensated, answer sheets continue to be missing and students are still making rounds of the University for mistakes in online assessments. In this kind of scenario, instead of blacklisting the contractor, why is the MU quietly releasing payments?” questioned Mr. Vedak.
Sachin Pawar of Student Law Council demanded that the MU give an assurance on stamp paper that it would declare results within 45 days as per the new Maharashtra Public Universities Act, 2016. The students are demanding a judicial enquiry into the online assessment system mess this year.
Though MeritTrac refused to comment on this issue when contacted on Friday, in an earlier interview, the company executive vice president Nagendran Sundararajan had complained about the firm having invested heavily on the Mumbai University project in good faith, and had run into losses due to non-payment. The company claimed that it had received its first part of the payment, a “very small part”, long after it started working on the project on May 2, 2017. It complained that the MU had been delaying payments for long citing “internal process delay” and had been assuring them of payments soon.