How Nitish Kumar can stop cheating in Bihar

The telltale pictures of cheating in the ongoing matriculation examinations in Bihar recently may have appeared as "shocking" to the rest of the world, but they did not surprise those who are familiar with government schools in the state.

These schools have been in a pitiable condition for many years, to say the least. Hundreds of institutions do not even have basic infrastructure such as classrooms, toilets, playgrounds or teachers. As a result, classes are not held regularly and examinations are never taken seriously.

Today, government schools have become the last choice of the people when it comes to educating their children. Anybody who can afford education in private institutions does not even consider government schools as an option.

Still, a large number of people are dependent on state-run schools, with more than 14 lakh students from these schools taking the class 10 examinations this year. In remote rural areas, government schools remain the only source of education for children and in many villages, students have to travel up to five to ten kilometres from their homes to reach a primary school.

Over the past three decades, none of the governments in power have succeeded in ameliorating the conditions. The present Nitish Kumar government spends most of its annual budget on education, but the overall scenario looks bleak even today.

That is why the conscience of many was not shaken when photographs of people scaling a four-storey building to help their wards cheat in the examinations at Mahnar in Vaishali district went viral. They argued that the children had no option other than resorting to unfair means because they had not been taught properly at the schools. However, the state’s education minister PK Shahi emphasised that cheating was a social issue and that the government alone cannot check it with the large number of the candidates taking the examinations every year. The minister’s remarks earned him brickbats from many quarters but it also spurred a debate on the role of the government in providing quality education to school students. 

Of course, the government schools did not always face such a fate in the past. Many of them, in fact, attracted the best of students. It was only in the past 30 years or so that the rot started setting in.

There were two primary reasons behind the decay — nepotism and corruption in the appointment of teachers, and the failure of successive regimes to allocate a bare minimum of funds for the upkeep and survival of old institutions. Absence of good faculty also had an adverse impact on the quality of education. These factors contributed to the rise of private institutions that charged exorbitant fee but were better managed in the state than any government school.

When Nitish Kumar took over as the chief minister in 2005, things started looking up with announcements for several incentives. Among other things, he launched the popular free bicycle scheme to arrest dropout rates in high schools. But his government’s move to appoint more than two lakh teachers on contract basis did not pay off. Since the consolidated wages offered to them was less than seven thousand rupees, the vacancies for teachers’ posts did not attract good candidates.

If the government is not able to deploy adequate number of personnel to ensure fair examinations at all centres, it should organise them in different phases on the lines of Assembly elections to avoid the embarrassment it faced after the recent cheating scandal. It can hope for the desired change only by working out a long-term plan to infuse a fresh lease of life in the government schools and make them the centres of excellence once again.