Schools in every district of the western Indian state have been found guilty of pumping up enrolment figures in order to comply with teachers’ wishes and retain government funding.
Almost 1,200,000 children listed in Maharashtra’s education department records are ‘missing’ from the classroom, a check by education inspectors has revealed. This means that in 2005-2006 alone the state squandered over Rs 725 crore on elementary schooling for children who either never existed or had long passed out of school.
Worse, while no one is exactly sure how deep the bogus enrolment scam runs, the state’s education minister admits to being aware for years that enrolment figures were being inflated by teachers to avoid transfers to schools in rural areas.
The state education department requires all districts to send in their final enrolment figures for the academic year by September 30. Funds for textbooks, uniforms and midday meals are allocated on the basis of the enrolment figures. Teachers, staff postings and the number of divisions in each class are also based on these figures.
The state spends roughly Rs 6,000 annually on each child’s education, up from Rs 147 per child annually that it spent in 1981. Maharashtra’s annual education budget for 2006-2007 is Rs 10,400 crore. It also receives Rs 1,000 crore from the Indian government for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (universalisation of education programme).
The mystery of the ‘ghost children’ was unravelled only when the state conducted a baseline survey in December 2005.
When education inspectors visited the thousands of government schools across the state, they detected a huge gap between the enrolment figures sent in by the schools and the actual number of students attending class. “Schools had sent in the names of people who had died, some others were married and had children themselves,” said one inspector.
Without exception, every single district in Maharashtra had inflated its enrolment figures; of the 82,10,143 children on the state’s school rolls, as of September 2005, only 70,01,646 were found by the inspectors to be bonafide entries.
For instance, the official figures from Pune district in September 2005 indicated that 505,575 children had been enrolled. But, checks carried out in December 2005 showed that the actual number was 311,840.
Senior education department officials say teachers who did not want to be transferred from cities to schools in rural areas would boost the enrolment figures of their schools, as any fall in student numbers necessitates the transfer of teachers to schools where the teacher-pupil ratio is low: invariably, these would be village schools. “Usually we find that (when) both husband and wife are teachers, and they want postings to the same place, they tend to maintain higher enrolment figures. In the case of private schools, higher enrolment figures means creating additional teaching posts,” explains an official.
Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Vasant Purke acknowledges that although education department officials are aware that enrolment figures are routinely inflated, they are shocked at the extent of the malpractice and the money that was wasted in one year alone.
