BANGALORE: Competitive parenting has reached a new level, with parents taking the RTI route to lay their hands on the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (Class 10th) answer scripts of their kid’s classmates. The Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board , which conducts the exam for over eight lakh students every year, is in a fix. Following a spike in such applications, it has written to the Karnataka government seeking its permission to exempt processing of answer sheets under RTI.

“We’re getting a lot of RTI queries for other students’ papers. We cannot encourage that. We cannot keep giving somebody’s answer sheets to others,” said KSEEB director, exams, D Venkateshaiah. “Moreover, it’s difficult for the board to discharge work within the stipulated time, especially during the peak post-exam season. Since sharing another student’s answer sheet is providing third-party information, the department has to get consent from the student concerned. We have so far rejected such requests,” he added.

Students can seek a photocopy of the answer sheet for a fee of Rs 300 per paper. Revaluation costs Rs 700 and retotalling Rs 150. An RTI request costs a mere Rs 10.

Recently, the Supreme Court upheld a Calcutta high court judgment permitting examinees to photocopy their answer scripts in any professional exam under RTI Act. The Central Information Commission order states that a student can invoke Section 7 of the RTI Act, following which the varsity is obliged to provide a copy of the answer sheet on payment of the photostat fee along with RTI application fee. However, all these are instances when their own answer sheets are involved.

Times View : Taking competitive parenting to extremes

To middle-class India, education is the tool to socio-economic mobility. Hence the heavy material and emotional investment in children's education. However, our limited higher education system is taking competitive parenting to extremes as exemplified by RTI queries wanting to know the marks obtained by children's classmates. Higher marks for a classmate may mean a seat denied in the desired college/course for one's child. While a healthy involvement in our children's life is necessary, obsessively tracking classmates' marks is downright paranoid.