Bihar rejects 4 mn applications to check fake degree racket

Patna, Jan 7 (IANS) The Bihar government has rejected about four million applications to check a fake degree racket and other irregularities in the teacher recruitment drive for government-run schools, officials said Wednesday.

Bihar's Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Hari Narayan Singh said the government had rejected nearly 40 percent applications while scanning them in course of preparing the merit list at different levels across the state.

'All the applications found enclosed with fake certificates or degrees have been rejected till date,' he said.

About 9,000 recruitment centres across the state had received more than 10 million applications for 93,000 teaching posts in the second phase.

Absence of industries and other business opportunities forced young men and women in Bihar to apply for jobs in government-run schools.

Last month the state government had blacklisted 75 B.Ed institutions in India and Nepal to check the racket.

Singh said the government was forced to blacklist the B.Ed institutions to check irregularities in appointment of school teachers.

In the last week of December, the government sacked 15,000 teachers for submitting fake degrees and certificates. The sacked teachers were appointed last year as part of the first phase of the recruitment drive.

Officials in the HRD department said the local dailies reported that applicants used fake degrees to apply for teachers' jobs. Acting on the reports, the government identified illegal institutions issuing fake degrees and blacklisted them.

Singh said some of the blacklisted institutions belong to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Punjab. The degrees issued by these institutions were neither recognised by the state government nor the National Council of Teachers Education.

'The government has circulated a list of such blacklisted institutions to all district level officials and directed them to immediately forward it to officials involved in recruitment of teachers at sub-division, block and panchayat level for scanning the applications,' he said.

The teacher recruitment drive started two years ago in Bihar in two phases. In the first phase, 136,000 teachers were recruited while in the second phase 80,000 primary teachers and 12,000 secondary and higher secondary teachers were to be recruited.