Dhuandada is sleepy tribal village under Kotagarh block of Kondhmal district of Orissa. Here, water in an unknown rivulet passing by stays for a while before flowing down. This is not a scenic description of a beautiful spot. The water body is a government primary school! At least, that is what the Orissa government records say. The government would have us believe that students are attending this school everyday and taking mid-day meals.
A wooden plank stands in the midst of a dense jungle near Nuasahi village of Phringia block of the same district. This, too, is supposed to be a primary school bustling with activities, as per government records.
There are such examples galore. Money has been flowing under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), a central scheme, for these schools. In official dossiers, money has been spent on construction of school buildings, purchasing equipment and paying salaries to teaching assistants. Text books worth crores have been supplied. Not only that, money from the women and child welfare department is being spent on mid-day meals. It is anybody?s guess where this money is actually going.
Money has also been flowing into about 1,200 schools where there are no students, about 6,200 primary schools, which do not qualify to be covered under SSA. While about 4,000 schools have below 20 children, about 2,200 schools are mostly run by NGOs within 1km radius of a government school. These schools have been identified by the Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA) which looks after the SSA scheme in the state.
During the last five years, central funds of Rs 3,000 crore have been spent on SSA in Orissa. The OPEPA spent Rs 613 crore on SSA in 2006-07. The budget for 2007-08 has been pegged at Rs 1,189 crore.
According to the state vigilance police, which conducted a test case in Angul district in 2005, though the budget for construction of school buildings is high, the quality of material and the works are very bad. ??Government engineers engaged in the work generate money for the higher-ups??, says the vigilance report.
A preliminary report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India says that there are about nine lakh ghost students in primary schools in the state. If that is true, the money spent on bogus students (at the rate of Rs 1,350 per child/year) must be going into ghost accounts of the certain officials. So also the money spent on text books and mid-day meals.
Such is the slush money?s clout that even the state school and mass education secretary, Suresh Patnaik, and OPEPA state project director, Deo Ranjan Singh, directives to close down these schools are not being implemented.
OPEPA, with the support of the Orissa Computer Application Centre and Idcol Software Ltd has built up a data base on primary education. The child tracking system (CTS) module developed by OPEPA has received national awards. Following CTS success, OPEPA has launched an Educational Personnel Information System to keep track of teachers and and Geo-Information System to take stock of the infrastructure. OPEPA’s data base is now being used by other state government departments, like women & child welfare and panchyati raj.
Ironically, OPEPA is reluctant to accept its own data. For, this will expose the rut in the system. The data is quite revealing. There 79,000 schools with 68 lakh students and 1.7 lakh teachers in the state. As per SSA, each child should be in school. But there are 5.38 lakh children out of school even after of five years of SSA implementation. Also, about 1,000 schools have no building and other infrastructure.