Report by Hemant Kumar Rout for The New Indian Express

With over 1.5 lakh backlog vacancies slotted to be filled up through competitive examinations soon, the Odisha government on Tuesday banned outsourcing of recruitment process and directed departments to select recruitment agencies with utmost care.

The General Administration (GA) department has asked departments and recruitment agencies, including state selection board, police recruitment board, OPSC, OSSC and OSSSC not to allow outsourcing of the examination or part of the examination process.

“Utmost care should be taken to select the agency for conduct of recruitment examinations and outsourcing by the agency to others should be strictly stopped,” read the letter from additional chief secretary of GA department Surendra Kumar.

The direction came after it was observed that many recruitment agencies were outsourcing the activities to very small companies having no or little credentials leading to discrepancies, lapses in the process and law and order situation by candidates. The GA department has set a standard operating procedure to ensure a zero tolerance policy towards irregularities while conducting recruitment.

The department has made it clear that no error or deviation will be tolerated, particularly those of human origin which could have been prevented. The departments and recruitment agencies have been asked to ensure that all exam centres have CCTVs at appropriate places and the logs of the CCTVs are checked by a team of police officials with a live feed to OCAC/NlC for auditing of any incident.

SOP issued for question paper preparation and examination platforms

They have been instructed to go for random selection and change of examination centres to avoid compromising the staff of centres and collaboration with unwanted personnel. Use of secure online exam platforms with robust encryption to protect exam data, implementation of proctoring solutions that offer live human monitoring or Al-powered tools to detect suspicious behaviours like eye movements or screen switching have been advised.

A set of guidelines has been released for preparation of question papers, optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets, examination centres, pre-examination security, post-examination processes and the use of artificial intelligence. All examinations, whether conducted online or offline, must be organised in a foolproof and secure environment for ensuring greater transparency and efficiency in the conduct of examinations. “The departments and agencies will have to strictly adhere to the SoP while conducting recruitment examinations or any competitive tests under their administrative control,” Kumar said.

Plans are also afoot to establish a high security printing press for printing of question papers of various competitive examinations and to constitute a committee with members from Higher Education department, OCAC, NIC and the examining bodies to finalise the details of the examination centres.