After over a year’s delay, the Central Board of Secondary Education has begun the release of payment, through its Integrated Payment System (IPS), to its Board evaluators, Head Examiners, Assistant Head Examiners and Observers for Term 2 Board examinations conducted in April 2022. Teachers of private CBSE schools across India, who had evaluated answer papers, complained they were not paid the honorarium for many months.
Over the past year, the CBSE had issued several circulars urging evaluation centres to file beneficiary details, and pushed the date of payment citing multiple reasons.
“I had reached out to multiple helpline numbers and sent mails to CBSE but got no response from them. The centres would just ask us to wait it out or contact CBSE. They (centres) would say they have filed all account details and it was up to CBSE to pay. Soon we would see another circular from them (CBSE) stating there are multiple errors in filing details and it needs to be re-done. We had no clarity on how long the wait would be to get paid for a job we did diligently,” a CBSE school teacher in Chennai pointed out.
While multiple sources confirmed they received payment only from May 20,2023, onwards, the CBSE did not say when the payment disbursal commenced.
“The process of payments for this year has been eased out and payments to approximately 1.8 million (18,00,000 crore) functionaries and ₹700 crores disbursed since the inception of this system,” a senior CBSE official told The Hindu. “It is an exercise of such a great magnitude and it is normal for a lot of trial and error to occur in the process. The system takes time to adjust,” the official added.
The filing of beneficiary details into the now one-and-a-half-year-old IPS online facility by the board has stirred a conversation within the teaching fraternity. “We are not sure if there was ample testing done before the system was rolled out. We can understand that any new initiative requires a lot of time to start working but we cannot justify the delay of over a year. To some teachers, this money makes a lot of difference and the delay has caused personal setbacks,” a teacher in a CBSE school in Karur district, Tamil Nadu, said.
What is IPS and why was it introduced?
Integrated Payment System (IPS), introduced by the CBSE in October 2021, allows for the automatic calculation of remuneration without human intervention. After the submission of inspection reports and account details, IPS allows for direct bank transfer of honorarium and TA/DA to the intended payee.
“We are cognisant that we need to be forward going and we are a progressive Board. CBSE has made a great IT initiative to facilitate payment directly into the beneficiary’s account. Establishing this required multiple level interventions, coordination with direct beneficiaries and agencies and data integration, development of relevant software, review systems and trials before and after the roll out,” the official explained.
Prior to 2021, the disbursement system was different. “On the last day of evaluation, we would be given cash. We never faced any issue with it. It is great that everything is being digitised but why have we been left in the dark about the payment,” asked a senior secondary teacher from a school in Delhi.
However, the CBSE in its circular had said, “the payment process would earlier take close to 6 months to complete because the process would pass through several manual checks by the officials.”
In a statement made The Hindu, the CBSE acknowledged that those facing problems in receiving payments are being contacted by Regional Offices of the Board as there are multiple reasons for non-receipt of payments.
Has IPS benefited the evaluation staff?
While the board has issued multiple circulars since 2021 on the effectiveness of IPS and urging schools to adhere to the procedure for submitting details, it has taken unprecedented time for the ball to get rolling. In fact, in a recent notice dated March 25, 2023, the CBSE provided an array of reasons for why disbursement of remuneration had not been carried out for Term 2 examinations earlier:
- Schools had filled wrong subject codes in the system, leading to the failure in generating batch IDs that were required to identify the centre, it’s evaluators and the work done by them.
- In certain cases, additional answer books (more than the stipulated number) were issued to evaluation centres for assessment. This resulted in staff members working more than 12 days, which is the limit set by the board. This was not accepted by the system and payment was not processed.
- For the Centre Superintendents deployed from outstation cities, TA/DA was not processed through IPS and no specific reason was provided by the board.
- Apart from these, some payments could simply not be processed through IPS (possibly due to error in entering details, network issues, server issues, etc.)
- The payment of compartment examinations 2022 including centre charges and CNS charges have not been released at all.
The many hurdles faced by evaluators
“If the Board thinks that conducting exams and paying evaluators is a massive process, then we must also bring to notice how large of an exercise actual evaluation is. We sit in non-AC rooms during the summer, on any type of chairs provided by the centres and have no mechanism in place to ensure we are treated well,” a teacher said.
Moreover, teachers are also not given an option to choose their evaluation centres. They are often assigned far-off schools that leave them travelling for exhaustive hours and spending excessively on transport. “I covered 150kms to and fro the centre each day and would reach home very late at night. We end up having little to no personal life and even develop back issues,” a senior secondary teacher from Karur district in Tamil Nadu said.
The teachers hoped they would not have to endure the delay in payment for future examination evaluation.
