SHIVAMOGGA: School Education and Literacy Minister Madhu Bangarappa said his department would move swiftly on teacher recruitment following the state cabinet’s decision on internal reservation for scheduled castes.
Confirming that preparations for CET are on and the test will be held soon, the minister said directions have already been given to department officials to process the recruitment drive, including hiring around 5,800 vacancies in aided schools.
“The highest recruitment in the entire state happens in my department,” he said.
“People have studied hard and are waiting patiently. I know their struggles. I will not delay anything unnecessarily.”
On the recently declared SSLC results, Madhu went on the offensive against former chief minister Basavaraj Bommai and MLC H Vishwanath, both of whom had questioned whether the improved pass percentage was genuine. Bommai had suggested that lowering the passing marks from 35 to 33 had artificially inflated results.
The minister dismissed the charges with numbers. He said only 1,482 students, a mere 0.15 percent of total candidates, had crossed the line because of the threshold change. He pointed out that 33 marks is the standard passing benchmark across most states and that central government administrative reform bodies had long recommended this standard.
Bangarappa credited the improvement in results to a series of reforms introduced by his department over the past two years, including webcasting of all exam halls, which he said Karnataka pioneered nationally and which CBSE has since adopted permanently. He also cited the mega parent-teacher meeting held across government schools last year, free electricity to government schools, and three-stage preparatory exams for SSLC students.
The minister reserved his sharpest words for Vishwanath, saying the former minister had no business questioning results while himself having moved between parties without winning a public election and currently sitting as an MLC. “The children have already answered him through their marks. I do not need to,” he said, though he added that he would not respond harshly given Vishwanath’s age.
On Bommai, he reminded that exam hall cameras were switched off during the BJP government’s tenure, allowing widespread copying, and that the Congress government under Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had introduced webcasting precisely to stop the practice. “You taught children to cheat. We taught them to study. The results speak for themselves,” he said. Later, the minister honoured students who scored the highest marks in the SSLC and II PU examinations.