The teacher, Dhirendra Lal Das, has been teaching students of all five grades for months now.[break]
Asked how he managed to handle all five classes simultaneously, Das repeatedly attempted to dodge the question. After some minutes of prodding, Das confessed, "Our registers are fake." According to him, the school has hardly 25 students. "As our school has very few students, I can handle all the classes," Das said. "Some students mentioned in our register do not exist."
Let alone a far-flung village school, the phenomenon of fake students exists even in Kathmandu Valley. Hardly 25 students attend Buddha Primary School at Dalchoki village of Lalitpur district. However, the school administration has 140 students in its register. Interestingly, the school does not have a single student in fifth grade.
However, the register shows 16 students in that grade. The school has retained four teacher posts, funded by the government, by submitting fake student names.
PCF policy backfires
The tendency of schools registering fake student names and submitting them to the Department of Education (DoE) through the District Education Offices (DEOs) began after the Ministry of Education (MoE) decided to implement a Per Child Fund (PCF) policy from the academic year starting in 2008.
According to the PCF policy, MoE allocates teacher quotas, textbooks, scholarships and funds to a school as per the number of its students. Simply put, the more students a school attracts, the larger the slice of the educational fund pie it gets. PCF, ostensibly implemented for bettering education, has resulted in the tendency of schools submitting fake student names.
According to PCF policy, every school has to have 40 students for retaining one teacher´s post to be funded by the government. By adding 40 more students, the school gets another teacher post. However, this ratio of students and teachers is virtually nonexistent in practice. Schools which have less than 40 students have registered fake names to retain extra teacher posts. Submitting fake names, these schools also get more funds for other purposes.
"This can be termed decentralization of corruption," argued Rajan Sharma, president of Concern for Social Affairs (COFSA), which has carried out research on the problem of fake students. "The involvement of local leaders of different political parties has exacerbated the problem. Almost all schools have registered fake student names with the consent of the management committees. Communities to whom schools have been handed over are not oblivious of the problem either."
At an interaction held in Jajarkot district a few months ago, the number of students registered at the District Education Office turned out to be higher than the number of children in the district of school-going age. And yet the number of children who remained out of school was as high as 12 percent. "We have found fake students in many districts," Sharma said.
Serious upshot
An obvious consequence of government schools submitting fake student names to obtain more teacher posts and funds is corruption. Chances of corruption are high if schools get unnecessary funds and teacher quotas. Apart from likely corruption, it could cause errors in the government´s entire statistics about school education. A recent case has already raised questions over the government´s yearly report at a glimpse.
Janak Education Material Center (JEMC), which has been printing textbooks for government schools, printed over 4.8 million textbooks for primary level students for this academic year, according to DoE´s recent report at a glimpse. However, only around three million textbooks have been purchased by government schools. Around 1.8 million textbooks are left over.
"In this case, either the number of students must be lower than that mentioned in the government´s recent report or there has been corruption of some other sort," said a DoE official on condition of anonymity. Recently, DoE publicly announced that it would investigate.
Education experts fear that the problem of fake students could damage MoE´s entire data system. "If basic statistics on students are erroneous, there is no possibility that MoE will maintain accurate figures," one expert told Republica. "The government´s education plans will be far removed from ground reality if its statistics are full of errors."
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