CAG Raps Bangalore University, PU Dept for Deficient Services to Students
From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network

Bangalore, Jul 2: In a major indictment of the Bangalore Unversity and Karnataka’s Pre-University Education Department as well as the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) for their series of deficiencies in the application of software and computer services, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has held that the students were serverely affected in the service delivery besides causing huge losses of crores of rupees to the state exchequer.

The Information Systems (IS) Audit Report of the CAG, which was tabled in the State Legislative Assembly on Thursday, revealed that security and controls were inadequate in the software applications developed by entities and user requirements were not properly assessed.
The centralised admission cell (CAC) of the Bangalore University used loose set of programmes based FOXBASE, an outdated software, it said.
Though substantial investments were made, the top management in all entities did not recognise the need for formulating IT policies and strategy for orderly development of the information systems.

Further, none of the entities had sufficient qualified staff to support IS functions, the CAG said pointing out that the CAC and KEA employed contract staff without any technical supervision.

The software application of the examination wing of the university was not fully developed by the vendor and suffered many defects which made the software unreliable and necessitated manual interventions for correction of mistakes as a regular feature. The lack of controls in the software resulted in large scale mistakes in results and threatened the very credibility of the examination process. Coding and decoding using the software has been introduced only for two courses out of 296 in the university.

Continuance of manual coding and decoding before data entry of marks resulted in breach of confidentiality, malpractices and large scale errors in examination results, the report said.
The CAG said the software in the Finance Wing of the varsity was under-utilised due to lack of trained staff and absence of commitment from the management.

Referring to KEA, wrong version of code of the question papers was captured and valuation made with wrong version of the key answers due to absence of input controls resulting in wrong generation of ranks, the CAG said.