PESHAWAR, Nov 18: The newly-established educational boards in Frontier province are hampering the progress of Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Peshawar owing to their weak financial health, sources said.

“We want to increase fee of paper checkers and examiners to improve quality of marking and examinations but we cannot translate our wish into reality. All the eight boards are required to adopt the same fee structure. Other boards are financially very weak and cannot follow BISE Peshawar,” officials said.

According to rules, chairmen board committee’s decisions regarding educational boards are approved by the chief minister and all boards have to adopt uniformed fee structure.

Improved marking requires paying triple of the present fee to paper-setters and checkers but uniformed fee structure of all the boards has struck BISE Peshawar.

The BISE Peshawar was set up in 1961 to deal with the secondary education affairs in the province. The government set four more educational boards in Abbottabad, Bannu, Swat and Malakand in 1990 and in Mardan and Kohat in 2001 and Dera Ismail Khan in 2007 to deal with quantum of students. Except Peshawar, Mardan and Abbottabad others boards are yet to gain financial stability as they have never received grants from the government and the fee collected from the students is the only source of their income.

The educational boards were looked after by governor till 2005 when a provincial assembly act entrusted it on the chief minister. Under the act, the chief minister is authorised to select from a panel of public servants, a person as chairman, secretary or controller of examination. Previously retired army generals occupied these posts. A former military governor kept a list of his friends on laptop and used to appoint them whenever a post became vacant in the boards.

Now, the boards operate under professors, who unlike their predecessors, know about the integrity, experience, capacity of the examiners and paper checkers etc.

The process of scrutiny, setting of question papers and marking of answer papers have improved and cheating has recorded decrease. Registration of only 100 unfair means (UFM) cases among 110,000 students in 2008 clearly indicates improvement in the affairs after taking over of boards by educationists.

Besides generating their own resources, BISE Peshawar and Kohat also paid Rs10 million each for setting up of Kohat University. The board has implemented the government’s announcement regarding raise in salaries and cost of stationery, fuel and electricity etc. But the government doesn’t allow hike in fee. On the other hand the board had no other source of income to pay more to its 229 employees except fee’s raise.

In 2004, the government squeezed Peshawar and Kohat boards by asking them to pay Rs10 million each for the construction of Kohat University at the cost of students, who had since been made to pay 40 per cent more in lieu of admission and others heads.

The BISE Peshawar is unable to construct 10 houses in its Staff Colony hosting 74 staffers despite having desired amount.

Exchange of papers under which the boards checked the papers for other boards was started in 2006 to ensure conduct and results of examinations by all boards simultaneously. The educational boards send their answer papers to others for marking. Each student attempts six papers and 20,000 candidates means transaction of 150,000 papers which is not an easy task.

Officials also believe that this has affected the quality of examinations because it was not easy to conduct examinations and collect all the papers from examination halls and then dispatch them to other boards to be collected after marking and announcing results in three months in the fulfillment of the boards’ calendar.

The BISE Peshawar’s dreams to do away with the problem of loose marking and bringing about uniformity in it couldn’t be materialized owing to those problems.

It has recently increased fee for setting papers and like to further enhance its quality of paper marking. The decision has irked other boards that could not raise the fee due to their financial health.

Other boards have fully computerised records compared to BISE Peshawar which still has its 50 year manual data in bulky registers. Officials conceded that launching several measures aiming to improve quality of examinations and other services had taken a back seat in the wake of existing uniformed rules for all boards.

Other boards on their part have kept mum on these problems and things go unnoticed by government. In the process, the students appearing in SSC and intermediate examinations suffer.