Thousands of ghost students weeded out in Indian state

Patna: Education authorities in Bihar have struck off the names of more than 300,000 fake students from the school admission registers. Authorities say the crackdown will ultimately improve the quality of education in government schools.

The students are said to have enrolled themselves in two to three schools at a time, apparently to get the benefits of government schemes such as free cycles, stipend, mid-day meals and school uniforms.

The number of ghost students could cross two million as the exercise to identify them is still on. Bihar has 38 districts, and the 336,000 students identified so far are from nine districts.

The authorities stumbled upon the huge chunk of ghost students during the "register cleaning" drive which they launched following complaints of fraud in the government-sponsored mid-day meal scheme. The drive was launched by the Bihar Educational Quality Mission.

"We are stunned at the huge number of fake students finding their way into the school registers. We have made it clear that severe punitive action will be initiated against both students and their parents if they were found involved in any such fraud again," Bihar's education department principal secretary Anjani Kumar Singh told Gulf News yesterday.

The free cycle scheme is the dream project of chief minister Nitish Kumar who launched it to improve attendance in government schools. Initially, the scheme was for girls only, but later it was extended to boys.