By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
It is not just the loot of hundreds of crores of rupees by parents but the loss of innocence of lakhs of school-children, mostly girls, which has become the biggest casualty of the latest scam to hit the human resources development department in Bihar.
Only in July last a report on elementary education, released by none else but Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen at an official function in Patna, claimed that Bihar recorded 98.1 per cent enrollment in the age group of 8-14. It was said that within two decades illiteracy would be wiped out from the state. The media and NGOs went gaga over this outstanding feat though many of those working at the grassroots level questioned the veracity of the data and warned of impending scam. Yet experts from different states made a beeline to study the educational turnaround of the state.
But suddenly in the second week of this January chief minister Nitish Kumar ordered a probe into a unique type of scandal. If the officials are to be believed they, while making a survey, discovered lakhs of fake admission of children in schools as they wanted to take advantage of the government sponsored schemes––several of them centrally-funded––such as distribution of bicycles, uniforms, scholarship, mid-day meal etc from different places. Initial official figure of just 11 out of 38 districts of the state suggests that half a million children have been wrongly enrolled just to get cash benefit for buying bicycles and uniforms as well as scholarship. The figure of fake school-children may run into millions after complete and final survey of all the districts of the state comes. That as high as 70,000 fake enrollments have been found in a small ruralized district of Banka––which has a population of just 1.7 million––tells the sordid side of the story.
Children having the same name have been enrolled in different schools at the same time to get the government benefits. In many cases they jumped a class or two to get admitted in Class-IX in another school as bicycles are meant only for students of this class while uniforms and scholarship for all the other classes.
When two years back a girl topped the Class-X state board examination it was trumpeted that this was possible because she got money to purchase bicycle on which she used to go to school.
But the unearthing of scam of such an enormous proportion, not by media or any private agency, but by the government itself, has exposed the tall claim of 98.1 per cent enrollment. The number of genuine students in school may now come down sharply. This change in figure is likely to have its ramifications.
The tragedy is that it is not only the government officials, school headmasters and parents who are neck deep in the corruption even the young children are aware that they are party in this loot business. Only a few months back a large number of girls of a government school of Patna thronged the chief minister’s Janata Darbar to complain that they have not got cash amount for uniforms and bicycles. The media gave widespread coverage with photos of how the chief minister ordered the immediate fulfillment of their demands. Now nobody can say for sure that all these girls were genuine. May be the school authorities were right in withholding the amount.
Now the state government has decided to lodge an FIR against all the beneficiaries and take punitive action against the officials and headmasters. But it is a gargantuan task and involves expenditure of huge amount of money.
Provided the government succeeds in getting all those involved punished and parents return the money procured in illegal manner what will happen to millions of children who got ‘enrolled’ into the den of corruption. Who will compensate for the loss of their innocence?