The Karnataka Guarantee of Services to Citizens Act (2011) or Sakala which was implemented in schools in April 2012 will soon cover government degree colleges as the Department of Collegiate Education is set to join 18 other departments under the Act.
As part of the Sakala initiative for government degree colleges, services such as retotalling of marks secured in examination, revaluation of examination papers, issue of duplicate marks card or certificates will be made simple and more accessible to students.
Apart from these, there will be some more special services that will be included, according to the needs of the department, said a senior official from the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR), which is implementing Sakala.
Resource persons from DPAR have begun training Department of Collegiate Education staff to consolidate data and simplify the processes.
Colleges have been instructed to co-operate with DPAR officials who will be installing notice boards in government colleges regarding Sakala to create awareness among students and the public.
According to Venugopal, Principal, Government Ramnarayan Chellaram College, Bangalore, colleges are swift in taking action on requests of students. “The problem is when the colleges need to source documents from the universities. It is at that level that we need programmes such as Sakala which will create some fear among the staff to act in time and move files quickly,” he said.
T.M. Manjunath, president, Karnataka Government College Teachers’ Association, said that training all government college administrative staff to serve students quickly is important.
“Efficiency of the staff is subject to which college they belong to; while some colleges are quick in moving files, others fail as their staff is not efficient. Once that is done, the students will surely benefit. Also, the same initiative should be implemented at the university level to help papers move smoothly,” Mr. Manjunath said.
