Bihar education department sounds alert after detecting 20 lakh ‘ghost students’

Bihar’s education department has written to the district magistrates in the state to take utmost precaution not to admit fake students just to increase enrolment figures, as the names of around 20 lakh such names were removed from the school registers last year.
“In 2023-24, the names of around 23.97 lakh students were removed from the registers for remaining consistently absent and of them only 3.98 lakh students sought readmission. The rest did not bother to approach the headmasters or the DEOs. They either studied elsewhere or got admitted just to avail benefits of direct benefit transfer (DBT),” said a letter from director, secondary education to all DEOs.
Maintaining that the new academic session is to commence from April 1 and the admission process has to be completed by March 31, the letter says it is important to ensure that only genuine and interested students are admitted and not those who just want to avail benefits.
“The government gives a lot of incentives for improving education, but it cannot be allowed to become a source of scam. It is public money and meant for improvement in schools to help the needy,” said a senior official of the department.
The department has made it clear in the letter that to ensure genuine admissions, it is important to verify the birth certificate, hospital registration record, Anganwadi record and undertaking from the parents.
“Aadhaar card can also be used for admission. The facilities of making Aadhaar cards have been started in two schools each in every block,” says the letter.
After the tough posturing to improve attendance of students in schools, which was hitherto conveniently ignored, large-scale dis-enrolment of students remaining consistently absent had been done.
This is, however, not the first time it has happened in Bihar. In 2011-12 also, rampant fake enrolments in Bihar schools had surfaced during the implementation of the health guarantee scheme for all students and later the ‘operation register clean’ had pointed to over 20 lakh missing students.
The reasons for inflated admissions were attributed to the massive exercise of bringing all out-of-school children to schools since 2006 through the government’s ‘Sankalp’ programme, in which the schools fudged admissions in connivance with local officials to improve their record and it confounded over the years.
The decision to remove names of students remaining absent for long periods was taken by the order of additional chief secretary (education) KK Pathak, who has himself been inspecting schools, sending teams across the state and monitoring presence of students and teachers on a daily basis.
“He has been particular about attendance of students and directed removal of names from the registers if they did not report consistently for more than three days without any valid reason and remained unresponsive for a fortnight despite reminder. If at any later stage the students report, they will have to give an affidavit that they will be regular for re-admission,” said a department officer.
The official said that enrolment was the yardstick on which the entire educational planning in the state was done – be it the requirement of teachers, schools, classrooms or distribution of funds for mid-day meal (MDM), bicycles, books, dress etc. – and if the figures go wrong, it would be difficult to achieve the desired objective.