NIC Data Centre, Delhi has always played a proactive and pivotal role in providing robust, reliable and secure service-delivery platform to its hosted applications, be it a website, portal or any e-Governance project. Continuing with its decade long success trail, this year too, NIC Data Centre has come out quite successful in publishing exam results & online counselling sessions for various Central & State Education Boards/Counselling Bodies at national level as part of its G2C endeavour.
To strengthen the cause of e-Governance and ensure efficiency in the process of delivering examination results to the students, NIC has started hosting exam results on the Internet. More than a decade back, the results of CBSE class Xth & XIIth examinations were the first to be published on net. Later, guided by the exemplary initiative, many more State Boards from different parts of the country seek out for NIC’s assistance in publishing their results online.
On the similar lines, the concept of on-line counselling which was started long back with AIEEE/CCB (All India Engineering Entrance Examination/Central Counselling Board) has been simulated by many other Counselling Boards for hassle-free and transparent counselling sessions.
ONLINE PUBLISHING OF EXAMINATION RESULTS Electronic process has spun the results publishing activity faster, better, rendering it more dynamic and interactive. NIC has responded to the needs of this new, fast moving, paperless process by offering a number of different methods and innovative combinations of novel and traditional technologies. Using mediums such as Internet, Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) and SMS, NIC has ensured that students can avail quick access to their results.
A dedicated portal www.results.gov.in has been developed by NIC as a single point source for the results of various examinations conducted all over India. The portal contains dedicated corners for the students, boards and schools/academic institutions.
The Student Corner on the portal enables students to get registered on the portal and submit their preferences. Besides this, it provides a whole lot of advance information related to important web resources, admission announcements, admit cards, mark sheets, online counselling to students from time-to-time.
The Board Corner on the portal facilitates various boards all across the country to communicate with schools/institutions affiliated/associated with them and announce various exams related information such as call for applications, submission dates, on-line submission of application forms, delivery of admit cards, result declaration dates as well as declaration of the results through various channels.
The School corner of the portal is customized to the needs of the schools as well as Academic Institutions and cater to their specific requirements, be it getting school/institution wise consolidated Results, electronic delivery of communications from the Examination Boards. More importantly, the schools/institutions can evaluate their performance over the years on number of parameters.
So far, the exam results published on the portal include CBSE exam results, CA exam results, and exam results of the State Boards of Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, MP, Orissa, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand etc. Alone this year, NIC has hosted 50 examination results of around 18 Central/State Education Boards.
ONLINE COUNSELLING Previously, the manual counselling process was very lengthy and cumbersome as it requires personal interaction between candidates and counsellors at various stages and takes around 30 to 40 days to accomplish. To overcome these hassles, NIC has implemented the counselling through online system and enhanced it by reducing personal interaction to some extent, thus speeding up the whole process ensuring high transparency throughout.
NIC generated solutions have seamlessly enabled Central Counselling Boards i.e. Medical, Hotel Management (NCHM) and various State Boards to conduct their counselling activity online for the allotment of seats to the candidates (based on the criteria filled by them (rank, category, choices and seat availability within institutions) during the admission process for various professional courses like Engineering, M.Tech., MCA, MBA, Medical(UG & PG), BCA, BEd, Diploma Polytechnic courses etc.
Thousands of candidates took part in the online counselling and have been greatly benefited by this system. For current year, NIC has carried out successful hosting of 13 Central and State Counselling sessions (including the recently introduced Central Medical Counselling for PG & UG Programmes).
NIC had initiated the process of publishing exam results online over a decade ago. Begin with CBSE results, today most of the school examination boards are publishing exam results online using NIC Services. Having all exam results at one place has made life simple for students, teachers & parents alike. Encouraged by the Success of Exam Results, today many boards disseminate admit cards & mark sheets online using the same platform. Continuing with its success trail, NIC has extended its infrastructure services to examination boards for online counselling to assist students seeking admission in the professionals Course of Engineering, Medicine, Management across the country providing an equal opportunity to aspirants in Urban & Rural parts of India.
The statistical data of number of students appeared for counselling at various Counselling Boards for the year 2013 has been enumerated in Table-I.
TECHNICAL FEATURES OF ONLINE EXAM RESULTS PUBLISHING & COUNSELLING The infrastructure used for hosting the Exam Results as well as Online Counselling constitute data-centre servers majorly placed at Delhi (IDC & NDC- Shastri Park), whereas some at Hyderabad(NDC). l Setup has been created in such a way that Delhi and Hyderabad infrastructure could work as Disaster Recovery (DR) for each other. l Server infrastructure works on multi-tier application architecture model having multiple web/application servers configured on load balanced clustering as front-end servers and Database servers on high availability/mirroring clustering as backend servers. l Server infrastructure ready with virtualization technology facilitated central resources management for its better utilization, quick deployment of standby/staging setup needed as and when. l Technology used is ASP & ASP.NET along with RDBMS database - SQL Server.
A COLLABORATIVE EXERCISE For ensuring high rate of success, the whole exercise has to be borne out of a collective effort from all concerned authorities viz. the Educations Boards, Counselling Boards/Organizations, the NIC Regional/State Centres and the technical experts from the concerned group at NIC Headquarters. Sensitive to the needs and anxious state of the students, it has to be realized that disseminating the exam results /counselling through the Internet is not just an ICT exercise. The concerned team has to work at all odd hours to meet the varying requirements of different boards and ensure that the results are made available to the students in a timely, accurate and convenient manner. As it is a collaborative exercise, the concerned State/UT centres and the divisions at NIC HQs have to work closely and cooperatively to make this exercise a success.
Hosting of exam results and counselling activity on Internet is being successfully conducted by NIC for many years now. NIC Data Centre is being instrumental in providing scalable, secure and readily available infrastructure support to various applications in this endeavour.
Table- I Statistical Data of no. of Students appeared for counselling at various Counselling Board for 2013 (# - counselling still running) (Image description: A table showing statistical data of number of students appeared for counselling at various Counselling Boards for 2013.)