CBSE introduces Integrated Payment System(IPS)

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is setting the tone for payment related digital governance in the post-pandemic world by developing a reliable payment mechanism for the management and disbursement of various payments through the Integrated Payment System (IPS). The newly developed system has digitally transformed a previously manual and time-consuming system into an efficient system that is devoid of human error.

Prior to the development and implementation of the IPS, payments made to various functionaries would undergo a long and time-consuming process due to the manual nature of the system. Being a National education body, the responsibility of conducting public examinations for schools affiliated with CBSE and various other competitive examinations such as CTET, recruitment tests etc. lies with the Board. Close to 10 lakh faculty members including Principals and teachers offer their services for the smooth conduct of such examinations.

Similarly, around 10,000 principals/ educational administrators are also appointed for the inspections of schools for affiliation/upgradation. All functionaries involved in examination or affiliation related duties would be paid an honorarium and TA/DA for their services after they manually raised a bill to the concerned authority. The payment process would earlier take close to 6 months to complete. This was because the process would pass through several manual checks checks by the officials. For exam duties, after such checks, the CBSE would then distribute the money to the centre superintendents, who would further disburse the payments to the various functionaries. For affiliation duties, CBSE would make payment toPrincipals/educational administrators, after such manual checks. This led to several steps and involved a large number of individuals in the payment system.

The introduction of a normative payment system through Integrated Payment System (IPS) allows for automatic calculations which eradicate the need for human intervention. After the submission of inspection reports in case of inspection duties and duty compilation certificate in case of exam duties or other such supporting documents, IPS allows for direct bank transfers of honorarium and TA/DA to the intended payee. This has been achieved through software integration with the bank payment gateway. The system relies on self-declaration/certification and has considerably improved the ease of undertaking such transactions. The IPS also allows for automatic validation checks which not only reduces the time taken to complete the payment process, but also reduces the possibility of committing false transactions and non-genuine disbursements.

The features of the newly developed IPS are in consonance with the principles of Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) and Ease of Living (EoL), and has been implemented successfully for Affiliation Inspection Payment, Board and CTET Examination duty payments.