KARACHI, March 5: After causing a lot of inconvenience to candidates appearing in their SSC (Class IX and X) annual examinations-2002, the Board of Secondary Education on Tuesday postponed the exams till March 29.

The exams for regular students, which were earlier scheduled to commence on March 6, have been put off owing to the failure of the board to provide admit cards to students and now the exams would be held after a gap of 23 days during which the board would ensure provision of admit cards to each and every candidate.

According to a decision of the board, the papers of class IX and X science and general groups for fresh students would now commence on March 29, while the sequence of papers, announced earlier, would remain unchanged. The BSE would issue a revised date-sheet soon.

Hundreds of students, whose examinations were scheduled to be held on March 6 and onwards, visited the BSE office on Tuesday for want of admit cards as cards were not delivered to them until Tuesday.

The candidates had lodged a strong protest with the board last week for its failure to provide them cards, and there were violent protests during which the second floor of the BSE was also ransacked.

Earlier, the BSE had advized the candidates to remain calm and approach their respective schools only, where cards would be made available to them by March 3 or 4.

Sources in the board said while the understaffed examination section failed to overcome the workload pertaining to the examinations, including the issuance of admit cards to regular and private students in time, the monitoring authorities of the board waited for a mess and then decided to induct a new controller of examination in the midst of the exam process.

The sources said examinations were being conducted despite the fact that the former controller, Javed Iftikhar, had expressed his inability to conduct the exams as per the schedule approved by the education department’s steering committee on the ground that he was heading an understaffed section.

The sources said that the work suffered as the staff was not given any additional monetary benefits for carrying out the work pertaining to on-going examinations.

Insiders said the BSE chairman was maintaining that he had taken a decision to postpone the examination at his own to facilitate the candidates, but things were not so simple for him as till Feb 28 he had been maintaining that all necessary arrangements had been for a smooth conduct of the examinations.

In fact, it was the controlling authority of the board who directed the chairman to postpone the examination after the induction of a new controller.

Muhammad Salim Khan is believed to be on deputation from education department and his terms and conditions pertaining to the new job are yet to be finalized.

The students, who visited the board office on Tuesday, said there was a need for overhauling the educational boards of the province as the boards had failed to deliver the goods.

In a statement on Tuesday night, the new controller of examination said due to unavoidable circumstances, admit cards to a number of candidates remained undelivered, so the board had decided to hold the papers from March 29 onwards instead of March 6 to 19. He attributed the failure to technical reasons and said that the BSE at the very outset had regretted the inconvenience caused to candidates, their parents and teachers.

“In order to provide a remedy to students, all papers pertaining to SSC Part-I and II, originally scheduled from March 6-19, would now be held in the same sequence of subjects/papers with a slight adjustment for which a revised date-sheets is also being issued”, added the notification.

The BSE has further advised the students to collect the revised date-sheet and admit cards from their institutions on or after March 16 if they are not in receipt of their cards.

Meanwhile, the BSE controller of examinations has announced that the left-over candidates, who had been declared as passed in the supplementary examinations of the board, could submit their examination forms on March 20 after necessary scrutiny by the section concerned at the Board.

It has been learnt that till Tuesday 5000-7000 cases of admit cards were still pending.