Pune: The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education did not allow private players to host the secondary school certificate (SSC, std X) result this year due to data privacy issues, leading to overloading of the board’s website and a six-hour delay before students could access their results, Dinkar Patil, chairman of the board told TOL.
The board declared the results online on Friday at 1pm, But, as soon as the link went live, it crashed as lakhs of students tried to log on to the website within seconds.
The technical department of the board finally made available two more links for students to access their results around 7 pm. These too were inaccessible till late on Friday evening. Unlike the past years when the state board had given the data to multiple private players to display the result for a fee, this year, the state board displayed all the results on its own servers, increasing the load.
Officials said there were complaints about the data being used for commercial purposes by private entities. Meanwhile, school education minister Varsha Gaikwad tweeted that an inquiry has been ordered to find out the reason behind the technical problem and strict action will be taken against those responsible.
“We used to allow private websites to host the data. The new IT Amendment Act of 2018 doesn’t allow us to share personal data with private companies. There were complaints about selling the data obtained from us for commercial purposes such as private classes. We were also concerned about the safety of data of girl students. From this year onwards, only the official website of the board will give links to students for accessing their results. This will be applicable to class XII results too,” Patil said.
Patil said there was a load on the server where results were uploaded and it was resolved by diverting the traffic to three different places. “Apart from the main website, there are two other links where the students can access their results now. Almost 60,000 downloads were registered by 7pm,” he added.
Meanwhile, the social media was abuzz with students complaining about the website crash. From funny to angry tweets, the students expressed their frustration about the lack of access to the result since 1pm.
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