Bihar Sacks More Than 1,000 Teachers Over Fake Degrees
2 min readPatna: Bihar has sacked 1,100 school teachers in the last five years for faking their own education qualifications, an official said Tuesday.
The state government has launched an investigation into the eastern state’s primary and secondary teachers to check the authenticity of their degrees, said senior state education official RS Singh to news agency AFP.
“We have removed about 1,100 school teachers in last five years in the state for using forged degrees to get jobs. Our investigation is on to verify degrees of more school teachers,” he disclosed.
The sackings underscore the immense problems facing the school system in India where teachers are underpaid and overworked, and tens of millions of children struggle to receive an adequate education.
The investigation was launched in the wake of a massive recruitment drive that was begun in 2006 by the government in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished and underdeveloped states.
Several officials said recruited teachers were required to have a graduate degree, but verification of their certificates only started after their appointment.
Bihar’s Education Minister Brishen Patel told AFP the verification process has now been stepped up.
“I have already directed concerned officials to speed up to verify degrees of all 2.5 lakh (250,000) contractual school teachers,” the minister said.
Bihar, with a population of almost 100 million, has some of the poorest literacy rates in India.
Standards of education in rural India have declined almost every year since 2009 despite huge government investment, a survey by Indian education research group Pratham has found.
Courtesy: NDTV
