Bengaluru: In what could come as a major relief for thousands of CET aspirants, the department of school education and literacy is planning to digitise the issuance of study certificates, Kannada medium certificates, and rural study certificates, bringing these services under the Sakala framework.At present, the certificate issuance process is entirely offline and manual. Students are required to approach the schools they studied in, submit applications at multiple stages, and obtain verification from school headmasters or block education officers. The verification is conducted manually on a school-by-school basis, often resulting in delays and repeated visits to govt offices.
The department now plans to transform the system into a fully online and automated platform. Under the proposed model, applicants will be able to submit a single consolidated application covering all the schools they have attended. Once generated, the certificate will be linked to the Aadhaar vault and stored centrally in a digital repository, enabling faster access, improved transparency and reduced administrative burden.“These services will be brought under the Sakala framework and made available through the Seva Sindhu portal. Once an application is submitted, the certificates will be issued within seven days. The system is timely and is expected to provide significant relief to students appearing for the Common Entrance Test (CET),” said Rashmi V Mahesh, additional chief secretary, department of school education and literacy.“Considering our disjointed schooling system — with primary, higher primary, high schools, and PU colleges functioning separately — students had to keep shuttling between schools to get their study certificates. Once the new system kicks in, there will be as little delay and human intervention as possible. It will prevent the students from visiting 4-5 schools. This will be a seamless method in which the application is received through Seva Sindhu and moved digitally to various schools and BEOs,” she added.Once an application is submitted online, the system will auto-populate data from the Student Achievement Tracking System, and get it verified by the school headmaster and the BEO (in case of private schools).Why is it important? The project is expected to kick off in a month. Study certificate, Kannada medium certificate, linguistic minority certificate and rural study certificate are important for higher education, employment opportunities and reservation quotas. With the certificates available in DigiLocker, they will be accessible “anytime, anywhere” for future needs, the department said.Around 3.3 lakh students register for CET, where these certificates are necessary for applying for these quotas. The department said with the new process, a standardised and uniform certificate format will be implemented across the entire state, with consistency in content and structure. The centralised, verifiable database will also eliminate the scope for fake or fraudulent certificates, it noted.
