18,000 ‘missing’ teachers face STF investigation

LUCKNOW: In a final warning to more than 18,000 ‘missing’ primary school teachers, the basic education department has asked them to either verify their service books uploaded on the Manav Sampada portal or face the music.
The department has, despite several reminders since February, set December 17 as the deadline to check service records and upload educational documents. Failure to do so will result in an investigation by the STF to ascertain whether they are fake teachers.
Data gathered by the education department shows that 18,110 teachers are yet to verify their service books, which are personal and professional details, uploaded by the department on the Manav Sampada portal, an online database of teachers created for digitization of records.
In June, TOI had blown the lid off the ‘fake’ teacher case where a full-time science teacher named Anamika Shukla was found working at 25 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas simultaneously for 13 months and taking home approximately Rs 1 crore as salary. After the scam, STF probe in identifying fake teachers had intensified. So far, STF has held about 350 primary teachers working on the credentials of others.
Director general school education Vijay Kiran Anand told TOI, “We have given a last chance to teachers to upload their educational records or they will be dealt with as suspicious.”
Anand added, “We will also check whether it was a data-related issue or a case of fake teachers. It may be that data of teachers who have retired or died has not been uploaded at block level. As of now, we can’t say that all 18,000 teachers are fake.”
According to the service book status report of December 2, about 97% or 5.9 lakh teachers out of 6.1 lakh appointed in basic education have verified their details.
In this mammoth exercise, teachers were asked to make corrections (through a Google sheet), if any, in their uploaded service books. They also had to upload their educational documents from high school to degree level.
The report shows that Sant Kabir Nagar district is the worst performer with 9% pending verifications, followed by Pratapgarh and Kanpur Nagar which have 6% verifications pending. Sambhal and Lakhimpur Kheri districts are top performers with 99% verifications completed.
In Lucknow, 353 teachers out of 8,041 have not checked records or uploaded the documents.
“There are technical issues due to which many teachers are unable to verify details on the portal. The service books are available at the block office. So why only blame teachers and not block education officers for the pending work,” questioned Vinay Singh, president of UP Primary Teacher Trained Graduate Association.