The National Assembly (NA) members have called on the federal government to ban the National Testing Service (NTS) from conducting aptitude tests for admissions in public sector universities.
The demand has come after uproar on social media against the corruption stories in the testing service.
During the proceedings, lawmakers protested over complaints that NTS members offer illegal favors to certain people against hefty bribes.
PTI MNA from KP, Sahibzada Sibghatullah, alleged that the testing service has become a money-making machine and was inflicting sufferings on the students.
“There is no one to make them accountable,” he said and added that after receiving heavy fees, students from far-flung areas were even refused entry in the examination halls.
The protesters received an affirmative response from the Federal Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, Ali Muhammad Khan. He pacified the lawmakers assuring that the matter will be raised in the next federal cabinet meeting.
The minister also said that the government will take strict action against NTS if wrongdoings are proven during the investigation.
“We will not spare anyone if found playing with the future of our youth.” He also referred the matter to NA’s standing committee on education.
The Convener of the Senate’s subcommittee on IT, Kalsoom Perveen, has previously raised serious questions on the performances of such testing services. During a meeting in September, she said:
These testing services like NTS are hubs of loot and plunder. They take hefty fees from candidates, most of whom belong to poor families, and take recruitment tests of different government departments. But the deserving candidates never qualify. These candidates appear again and again in the tests with the hope of getting government jobs which they never get. They pay heavy fees to the testing services that exploit the candidates as much as they can.
Even though the former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had ordered an overhaul of the organization to standardize the level of education across the country in 2018, no steps were taken in this regard.
