We have it from Education Minister Dipu Moni that the issue of the distribution of wrong question papers on the first day of the on-going SSC examinations is under scrutiny. That is a good move and the sooner citizens are offered a credible explanation of why such an incident occurred or who engineered the whole situation, the better all of us will feel. Dr. Dipu Moni has a tough job to do given that the sad decline of education in the last decade has left us worried about the ability of our young to be at par with the rest of the world in the future.

We are happy at the determination with which the new minister has gone into the job of freeing education of the chaos it has been in. She has promised that there will be no question leaks at examinations, which promise we expect to translate into reality. In recent years, it has been embarrassing for us that question papers even at the earliest levels of school education have been leaked through social media, with the consequence that questions have been raised about the performance of those taking part in the examination. The minister's responsibility now will not only be to ensure that questions are not leaked any more but also that those who, as part of a notorious racket, have been behind such scandals are nabbed and produced before the law. Unless that is done, one can be quite certain that these sinister characters will lie low for a while, observe the situation and then reappear in public and go back to their nefarious activities.

The resources of the State must be deployed in unearthing such elements. At the same time, extra caution must be exercised to ensure that parents do not fall into the trap of having to collect question papers beforehand from these elements in exchange of financial payment out of their unreasonable fears that their children may not do well without seeing the questions before the actual exams. It is a psychology which appears to have developed among a class of parents and it needs to be suppressed.

The SSC examinations now going on will be a litmus test for the education minister. They will be a broad hint of where the badly mauled education system goes from here.

By Editor-in-Chief -Enayetullah Khan