Odisha Govt To Crackdown On Teachers With Fake Credentials

Bhubaneswar: In an important decision, the School and Mass Education Department has decided to crackdown on teachers with fake credentials.

The Department has taken the initiative to verify the certificates and testimonials of all teachers in the state schools who were appointed in the last three years.

A high level meeting chaired by Development Commissioner Pradip Kumar Jena was held Monday in which the decision in this regard was taken. For this, the School and Mass Education Department will write letters to various universities of the country and the Educations Departments of of other states for verification of certificates and testimonials.

Special officers will be engaged who will go to different states and to speed up the process of verification of the certificates.
The Department has also taken a decision to implement digital format for the certificates from the current year using the DigiLocker of the Government of India through which there will be no bogus certificates. It will be first implemented for Board of Secondary Education(BSE) and Council of Higher Secondary Education(CHSE) courses.

It was also decided that a letter will be written to the IT Secretary regarding digitization of the certificates of issued by the BSE and CHSE. The Project Director of Odisha School Education Programme Authority (OSEPA) has been entrusted with preparing a database of all the teachers. Efforts will be made to speed up the scrutiny and filling of FIRs in needed against teachers with fake credentials. The Department will also take steps to recover the salary taken by the teachers who have been identified bogus.

The meeting also discussed about issuance of No Objection Certificate (NOC) to CBSE schools which will be made simpler and automated while applications will be accepted online. If the information provided by these schools is found to be wrong, no NOC will be provided for three years. It was also discussed that more emphasis will be on training of teachers. Thirty schools in the state will be identified in 30 districts where teaching will be imparted through the English medium.

The meeting was attended by Principal Secretary, School and Mass Education Bishnupada Sethi, President BSE, Chairman CHSE, and Project Director Odisha Adarsha Vidyalaya, and other senior officials.