As the focus of criminal culpability in the Karnataka Public Service Commission recruitment scam is on members of the commission and touts, academics have called for accountability of evaluators, without whose collusion such large-scale irregularities in evaluation could not have occurred.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID), that probed the irregularities the KPSC recruitments in 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2011, unearthed discrepancies in the evaluation process, including evaluation of answer scripts, interview, and in the selection of evaluators. However, the CID has not indicted any evaluator.
UPSC system Historian S. Settar told The Hindu that in the haste to indict KPSC members, corruption in the academic part of the examination had gone unacknowledged. He said if the academics who work as evaluators had put their foot down, there was no way KPSC members could have indulged in corruption. He said the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) had devised a system where even a small indiscretion by an evaluator was reported to the parent university and the evaluator was blacklisted.
The calibre of evaluators that the KPSC chose had to be looked into, he said. Presently, various universities recommend a panel of subject experts, from which the KPSC chooses its evaluators. Prof. Settar said many reputed scholars were never taken on board and it was those of questionable repute who usually ended up as evaluators.
The CID report on the 2011 KPSC scam states that 155 of the evaluators did not figure in the panel recommended by universities. Many retired professors were also enlisted as evaluators. Forty evaluators were repeated for many years. The CID in its report, said, “Pliable evaluators were appointed in furtherance of illegal designs.”
‘Aghast’
Writer and critic K. Marulasiddappa said he had been to the KPSC as an evaluator 15 years ago, but later quit because he was aghast by the irregularities.
Academic Muzaffar Assadi, who was among the 17 expert evaluators for the CID, said he had never been associated with the KPSC, owing to issues of its credibility. He said it would be wrong to cast aspersions on all evaluators, and added that any evaluation was always subjective. Unlike the UPSC, the KPSC had not evolved a system that removed the element of subjectivity from the process, he said, and questioned the guidelines for selecting evaluators.
