Ranoj Pegu says Assam to weed out ‘ghost schools, teachers

Guwahati: After “ghost students”, Assam is planning to do away with “ghost schools and teachers”, state education minister Ranoj Pegu said on Sunday.

He said that the special grants have been stopped for those who failed to provide complete information about the school staff, the salaries of such employees will be stopped in the next two months.
Addressing a press conference here, Pegu said, “We had already traced the ghost students. Now there may be ghost schools and teachers.

Ghost students, schools and teachers are those who exist only on paper. This is done to get government funds for various purposes.
About 4.50 lakh ghost students were detected in government and private schools in the state in June when reconciled with last year’s enrollment data.

More than 11,000 lower and upper primary government schools have failed to provide complete data on their staff, including both teaching and non-teaching, as requested by the department, Pegu said.
“The information was to be uploaded on a specific portal ‘Shikshya Setu’. After cross-checking with our records, we have found that 11,483 schools have not provided all the staff details.
“Until they upload all the details, we will stop the annual school grants and sports and physical education grants for 2023-24,” he said.

The minister also announced the sanction of grant for all information imparting schools.
“Now we are stopping the grants. If they don’t give the details, the salaries may also have to be stopped from August or September,” he said.

He pointed out that only basic details like educational qualification, date of joining, transfers etc. were sought.
“If they cannot provide even these few details, the government cannot pay them with public money. We are accountable to the people,”  Ranoj Pegu said.
While 2.08 lakh teaching and non-teaching employees of these schools have uploaded their details, around 35,500 are yet to do so.
“When the majority have uploaded, naturally doubts arise as to why others have not. Some may have genuine reasons and therefore, we request them to provide details immediately. Do it.”

Schools that complete uploading data will get grants immediately, the minister said, though he did not specify a time frame for doing so.