Bihar Government Orders Massive Statewide Audit of All Aided Madrasas and Sanskrit Schools

Bihar Education: As an initiative to impose stringent measures for financial transparency and compliance, the Bihar Education Department has issued an instruction for a detailed physical and administrative inspection of all the government-sponsored madrasas and Sanskrit schools functioning throughout the state. This is being done under the supervision of the Additional Chief Secretary of Education, and the objective behind such an exercise is to identify financial malpractices, establish ghost enrollments, and ascertain safety standards at the hundreds of educational institutions that are being funded by the government. For the execution of this gigantic process, special inspection teams comprising district education officers, engineers, and auditors are being sent to inspect the institutions' campuses.

The above-mentioned team will be required to carefully assess the students' records in order to eliminate any instances of fraudulent registration done in order to avail the midday meals scheme or any other form of assistance offered to the institutions in the form of scholarships. Moreover, the team will be required to scrutinize the financial records and ensure the authenticity of the qualifications of the teachers working in the concerned educational institutions. Any institutions lacking proper facilities or hiring unqualified teachers will not be entitled to any kind of help in the future.

Key Focus Areas of the Audit

The state government has identified certain verifiers who are made up of district education officers, engineers, and financial auditors. These inspection policies are governed by certain rules:

• Infrastructure Verification: Verifiers will physically inspect the institution’s premises for evidence of existence of adequate water supplies, proper toilet systems, strong boundary walls, and safe classrooms. Any poor infrastructure would lead to withdrawal of funds.

• Student Enrolment Audit: In order to avoid the existence of “ghost students” meaning enrolment fraud for the purposes of defrauding the mid-day meal programme and scholarships, the verification of student registers by each school is compulsory.

• Alignment of Teacher Attendance and Payroll: Inspection is done to ensure that there is alignment between the attendance of teachers in school and the attendance of the teachers according to the government payroll. Failure to meet their required standards would mean exclusion.