Uttar Pradesh government itself is responsible for the cheating racket it is trying to fix
The Uttar Pradesh government has proudly declared its project to end cheating in board exams a big success. More than 10 lakh students failing to appear this year is proof, it claims.
As reported in the first part of this series, in the board exams for Class 10 and Class 12 held in February, the state school board introduced a number of measures to control cheating. It reduced the number of centres, made video recording of exams compulsory and ensured the police were present in greater numbers. But teachers say this is only addressing the symptom and not the deeper malaise in the school system. The government itself is responsible for the mass-scale cheating in the state.
For a state as populous as Uttar Pradesh, it has a bafflingly low number of government secondary schools. Consequently, most of secondary education has been left in private hands and it is here that copying is most prevalent.
Lalmani Dwivedi of the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh explained why. Private schools, their management and staff are largely outside the government’s regulation.
“A government or aided school teacher is bound by the government’s service conditions,” said Dwivedi. “We could have our increments stopped or our salaries docked as punishment. But the government has no control over private school teachers.”
By systematically underfunding secondary education and setting up very few government schools, the government has created a system where private schools employ most of the teachers and enrol the bulk of the state’s students. This was possible because in the early 1980s, teachers were sidelined from the process of framing education policies and now they are drafted by political appointees and not education experts.