The appearance of a column for specifying the religion of students in the OMR sheets for the SSLC examination, 2013, has kicked off a row, even more so as they are required to specify whether they belong to a religious minority or not and if yes, whether they are Muslims or not. Highly placed sources in the state education department, say the draft OMR sheet released by the Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB) at the beginning of the academic year had only four columns to indicate the sex, caste and so on of the students.
But in the final draft, now released, a fifth column had been added for the students to specify their religion. The final draft of the OMR sheet has been released to train high school teachers to fill it up without error. An officer of the primary and secondary education department claims the new column has been added to mobilise data on the pass percentage of Muslim students as the community as a whole is educationally backward.
"In the last few years the pass percentage of Muslim students has reportedly fallen and we want to find out what the trend exactly is as this will help us come out with programmes to improve their pass percentage,” he said. Senior officials of the education department, however, refused to comment, saying they were not aware of the development. State education minister, Vishveshwar Hegade Kageri, when contacted too claimed he knew nothing about the matter.