GUWAHATI, April 6 - Taking a stern view of fake degrees, a tough-talking Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today said �each and every� certificate produced by teachers would be examined while provincializing institutions.
�A good chunk of the doctorate degrees produced by our teachers are those from universities like Magadh, Vinayak, etc. If we appoint fake teachers, we are doing injustice to the children. It should be our collective effort to ensure that the rights of the students are protected,� Sarma said in his reply to a special discussion on education in the Assembly.
He said the system of appointment of teachers in venture schools have been �opaque� and �no one knows how the teachers were recruited�.
�From now on, while provincializing, we will check each and every certificate of the teachers. If we find any fake degree, we will not provincialize them,� the minister asserted.
He said illegal appointment of some 600 grade IV staff and around 350 surveillance workers have been detected in the health department and all these employees would be relieved from their jobs.
The Minister also slammed the protests staged at Last Gate by the school teachers, questioning their commitment to their jobs. �They wanted to meet me. But how can a Minister meet any employee who has come here illegally. Who has given them casual leave or earned leave to participate in the demonstrations?� he wondered.
While there are 14 lakh students in the secondary level, there are around 72,000 teachers, making the student: teacher ratio 1:14, the Minister said, to drive home the point that fresh teacher recruitment was not the solution to the problem of quality in education.
He said when Sarat Barkataki was the Education Minister, around 3,000 TET teachers were deceitfully transferred overnight by tempering with the statistics in the computer systems. �We couldn�t rectify it till date. MLAs still come with application for transfer of teachers. But no one thinks about the students in the schools from which we are taking away the teachers,� he said.
The Minister informed that around 1,000 teachers are being transferred today as part of the department�s move to rationalize deployment. �After that we will be left with only 300 single-teacher schools,� he said.
