Patna: Authorities in Bihar have sacked two teachers after they were found to be moonlighting as reporters for two prominent vernacular dailies.
Officials said the teachers were posted at government high schools located in West Champaran district but routinely reported for their respective newspapers, which irked authorities. They had continued to write for their papers in spite of warnings by officials.
Subsequently they were served show-cause notices but both submitted false affidavits. “In the course of investigation of the cases pending against them, both were found being honoured as journalists at public functions,” local senior government official Aditya Narayan Dixit told the local media on Wednesday.
According to Dixit, an investigation led to proof that they had covered the local bodies’ polls in 2016 for their respective dailies. And so they have been placed under suspension. The cases against them had been registered last year with the local public grievance redress court after which investigations were ordered.
This is not the first time that teachers in Bihar have come under fire for all the wrong reasons. In 2015, about 3,000 schoolteachers who allegedly used fake certificates to get jobs resigned in Bihar fearing legal action. This happened after the Patna High Court refused to grant amnesty to those teachers who fail to resign on their own. A total of more than 40,000 teachers were believed to have submitted fake degrees to get jobs after which a vigilance probe was ordered by the state government.
Before that, the Bihar government had sacked 15,000 schoolteachers for having submitted fake degrees and certificates for recruitments in state-run schools. This happened after the state government recruited over 300,000 schoolteachers on contractual basis in 2006 without verifying their educational and professional degrees.
