<p>I was a witness and party to many interesting and even unbelievable episodes in the Common Entrance Cell, Bengaluru, where I had worked in the 1990s. Seat selection by the eligible, and qualified, candidates was an elaborate process and thousands used to be present, with their parents, everyday. Once the documents were found to be in order by officials, candidates aspiring to pursue engineering and medical courses were permitted to select seats in colleges of their choice based on their ranks in the Common Entrance Tests. As can be expected, glitches and complaints were plenty and naturally, a large number of people were milling around my chamber all the time.</p>.<p>Most problems had a common thread: missing documents like original marks card, study certificates confirming their domicile in Karnataka, and caste-income validity certificates if they were claiming reserved seats and so on. Most would be solved in a few minutes. </p>.<p>However, once a candidate came to me with a new, unprecedented, problem. The boy standing before me informed me, repeatedly, that our verification officials were unable to “feed” his date of birth into the computers! Unconvinced, I went to the verification counter myself. The verification officials too echoed the boy’s version of the problem. Surely, the system must have a problem, I thought. But the officials were able to feed-in everybody else’s dates of birth. Even the team from the National Informatics Centre, which provided technical support to CET cell, checked and confirmed the health of the systems. </p>.<p>The system refused accept his details.</p>.<p>Perplexed, I retreated to a quiet corner with the candidate and his parent in tow and poured over all his documents. No problems detected so far. Then I took the SSLC marks card, which is also a proof of date of birth. Finally, our Eureka moment arrived! The marks card had this printed: “April Thirty First Nineteen Seventy Nine”. How did the candidate get this far with this? He had obtained admission to pre-university course after his SSLC, written the common entrance test and cleared the same. All the while, being born on the thirty-first day of the month that only had thirty days!</p>.<p>However, the stalemate had to be resolved somehow. I asked the candidate to give a letter stating that he was actually born on May 1 and that by mistake it was mentioned as April 31 in his SSLC marks card. I also advised him to take immediate legal measures to change the date of birth to May 1 to avoid problems in future.</p>.<p class="bodytext">The candidate later chose his seat and went on to study and prosper, I hope. I still wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if the verification was manual, and we didn’t have a computer to refuse the date of birth! We probably would have somebody born on April 31, making a fool of all of us! </p>
<p>I was a witness and party to many interesting and even unbelievable episodes in the Common Entrance Cell, Bengaluru, where I had worked in the 1990s. Seat selection by the eligible, and qualified, candidates was an elaborate process and thousands used to be present, with their parents, everyday. Once the documents were found to be in order by officials, candidates aspiring to pursue engineering and medical courses were permitted to select seats in colleges of their choice based on their ranks in the Common Entrance Tests. As can be expected, glitches and complaints were plenty and naturally, a large number of people were milling around my chamber all the time.</p>.<p>Most problems had a common thread: missing documents like original marks card, study certificates confirming their domicile in Karnataka, and caste-income validity certificates if they were claiming reserved seats and so on. Most would be solved in a few minutes. </p>.<p>However, once a candidate came to me with a new, unprecedented, problem. The boy standing before me informed me, repeatedly, that our verification officials were unable to “feed” his date of birth into the computers! Unconvinced, I went to the verification counter myself. The verification officials too echoed the boy’s version of the problem. Surely, the system must have a problem, I thought. But the officials were able to feed-in everybody else’s dates of birth. Even the team from the National Informatics Centre, which provided technical support to CET cell, checked and confirmed the health of the systems. </p>.<p>The system refused accept his details.</p>.<p>Perplexed, I retreated to a quiet corner with the candidate and his parent in tow and poured over all his documents. No problems detected so far. Then I took the SSLC marks card, which is also a proof of date of birth. Finally, our Eureka moment arrived! The marks card had this printed: “April Thirty First Nineteen Seventy Nine”. How did the candidate get this far with this? He had obtained admission to pre-university course after his SSLC, written the common entrance test and cleared the same. All the while, being born on the thirty-first day of the month that only had thirty days!</p>.<p>However, the stalemate had to be resolved somehow. I asked the candidate to give a letter stating that he was actually born on May 1 and that by mistake it was mentioned as April 31 in his SSLC marks card. I also advised him to take immediate legal measures to change the date of birth to May 1 to avoid problems in future.</p>.<p class="bodytext">The candidate later chose his seat and went on to study and prosper, I hope. I still wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if the verification was manual, and we didn’t have a computer to refuse the date of birth! We probably would have somebody born on April 31, making a fool of all of us! </p>
