20,000 ‘extra’ students: Education department flags mismatch in data, to begin probe

GURUGRAM: The directorate of school education has come down heavily on all the district education officers (DEOs) of the state for submitting incorrect data on primary schools and students in their areas. The report they presented has inflated the number of primary school students by around 20,000 and that of schools by 57, officials said.
In a strongly-worded letter sent to all 22 DEOs on Friday, the directorate admonished them for submitting false and ‘cooked-up’ data. A scrutiny of the report submitted by the DEOs and the records on the Saksham Haryana portal’s Management Information System (MIS) — which is updated regularly by government schools in the state — revealed major inconsistencies in the number of government primary schools across the state, students enrolled in them, and number of teachers, it said.
The ongoing data assimilation exercise is part of the government’s schools rationalisation plan, under which teachers and students were to be shuffled based on head counts in classes and teacher-student ratio. This exercise is also meant to assess the total number of students that are eligible for mid-day meals, free textbooks and school uniforms, among others.
“Whether the manipulation of data was intentional or purely out of lackadaisical approach by teachers and officers is yet to be ascertained, as on-ground monitoring by dedicated officials was not possible during the lockdown. But the fact that data was grossly misrepresented is a cause of concern. Around 20,000 additional students were reported. This could cause huge financial losses to the government as it is committed to deliver services like mid-day meal and school uniforms even when schools are closed,” a senior education department official told TOI.
All district education officers have been given three days to rectify the data. Meanwhile, an internal inquiry will also be conducted to fix accountability of such discrepancies in submitting data.
While the data submitted by DEOs claimed that there are 8,693 primary schools in Haryana, only 8,636 are registered on the MIS portal. Nuh reported the maximum number of such ‘paper schools’. While the MIS data claims that there are 480 primary schools in the district, the report submitted by the Nuh DEO pegged it at 500. Similary, Mahendragarh reported it had 13 more schools than the actual number, while Gurugram inflated its primary school count by three.
Further, the data submitted by DEOs inflated the number of students enrolled between classes 1 and 5 in government schools by 19,703. It claimed there are 9,11,606 such students, while education department asserted that the actual number of students registered in the MIS portal is 8,91,903. The maximum discrepancy in number of students was reported from Hisar, which showed it had nearly 16,000 more students than the actual count. Hisar was followed by Faridabad and Gurugram, the records of which reflected a difference of 585 and 510 students, respectively.
In 11 districts of the state, the DEOs wrongly declared that 152 schools have zero students. These include 58 schools in Charkhi Dadri, 40 in Mewat and 32 in Hisar, among others.
DEOs also under-reported the overall teacher count in their respective districts, the department claimed. While the data they submitted said a total of 36,874 teachers are employed in primary schools across the state, the MIS maintained by the department claimed that there are 37,523 teachers — a difference of 649.