Islamabad March 14 (TNS): A notice flickering on the website says: “In the larger interest of candidates it is to inform that PST Tests for Elementary & Secondary Education Department Khyber Pakhtunkhwa conducted on 3rd & 4th March, 2018 and C.T / T.T tests scheduled on 9th, 10th, 11th March 2018 are postponed. Rescheduling of tests is in process and new schedule will be issued soon to candidates. Candidates are required to stay connected with NTS website for information and updates.”
The above-mentioned tests were cancelled/postponed after a scandal surfaced that some NTS officials leaked question papers to the candidates, appearing for the exams, against a hefty sum.
After the scandal surfaced, several candidates took to the streets in Peshawar and other parts of the KP last week, demanding the provincial government to delist the self-claimed testing organization, which they alleged was exploiting the people especially the educated youth desperate for jobs.
The NTS — which claims to be “Pakistan’s first, and self-sustained testing organization carrying out tests and assessments for admissions, scholarships, recruitment and promotion etc” — is involved in a cunning act and scheme deceiving and fleecing people and dozens of public sector organizations which have outsourced their crucial tests to an organization whose status and working is shrouded in mystery and total secrecy. Nobody knows how the organization was formulated, when and how it was notified as it is neither registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, which regulates the corporate sector, nor with any other government regulatory body.
Set up by the Comsats Institute of Information Technology in 2003, the NTS has been in the business without revealing its true identity whether being a private or a government entity, byut it claims to be “not-for-profit company limited by guarantee – not having a share capital under Section 42 of the Companies Ordinance 1984 regulated by SECP”.
Interestingly, dozens of public sector organizations including the FIA, the Ministry of Ddefence, all provincial governments and semi-government organizations have hired the services of the NTS for conducting tests from applicants/ candidates aspiring for jobs.
The murky working of NTS:
The NTS either contacts the government and private sectors through its agents or they themselves outsource the tests to the testing body, which in return, charges fee ranging from Rs1000 to Rs200 from the candidates, mostly unemployed youth, before conducting the so-called tests.
It’s an irony and a total collapse of public sector organizations that they have completely surrendered to the NTS. Various public sector organizations just advertise jobs and leave the rest of the hiring process to the NTS.
As far as the private sector organizations are concerned, according to sources and some former employees of the service provider, the NTS, as part of its trick, contacts private organizations through agents offering its service.
If a private organization comes with a reply that it has no vacant positions currently to outsource for conducting the test, the NTS agents ask the organization to create fake vacancies, float advertisement, receive applications and outsource them to the NTS, which will charge a fee and return 50 percent of the income (received from the applicants) to the organization while retaining the rest of sum.
After that, the NTS prepares toughest questions for the so-called test so that a negligible number of candidates could pass it. After the whole process, a selected number of candidates are called for fake interviews, where almost all the candidates get knocked out, and if someone pulls through the interview; he or she is assured to be contacted but most of the time the assurance never materializes. When an applicant inquires about the status of the test, he or she is told that “they have failed to qualify for the vacancy. Interestingly, the murky episode goes on and on and on and the gullible candidates always get trapped as they have no other option but to put their hard-earned money in the pocket of the NTS, which has become a money-printing machine.
In 2016, a parliamentary committee had expressed deep concern over the fraud of NTS and its looting-spree of the unemployed youth. One of the committee members had also taken the Establishment Division to task for allowing the NTS to carry out tests on behalf of government organizations by charging a hefty fee from the people who were already jobless.
“When the applicants inquire about their status then they are told that they have failed to qualify for the position,” one of the members had observed in the meeting.
“NTS is a fraud. No one knows how it was formulated when it was notified and who is regulating it,” Senator Kulsoom Parveen had told the meeting back in 2016.
In November 2017, the FIA Sindh team had launched a probe against the NTS, after some of its members leaked question papers of medical colleges in Sindh. According to the FIA, the question papers were leaked 10 hours prior to the test. The inquiry has not been made public since then while the service provider had termed the inquiry “politically-motivated”. However, some staffs of NTS Islamabad were removed after the scandal surfaced.
In 2017, the Auditor General of Pakistan had found several discrepancies in its special audit of the NTS, and the audit revealed that “the NTS was functioning without rules, policies, corporate strategy and organised objectives that caused misuse of funds, misappropriation of billions of rupees” and the audit had raised questions over its legality.
The audit was invited by the Comsats’ board of governors through the Higher Education Commission in October 2016.
In the same year, Comsats pro-rector Haroon Rashid, who was the CEO of the NTS, fled to the US after his PhD thesis was found to be 72 percent plagiarized and the institute has replaced him and currently, retired army officials are holding top slots of the NTS.
When contacted on the NTS’s given number 051-8444441, an automated voice repeatedly replied “the call is being transferred to the relevant desk”, but it was never attended despite several attempts to take a version of the service provider.
