Fake degrees: Bihar sacks 15,000 teachers

(December 12, 2008) The Bihar government has sacked 15,000 teachers for having submitted fake degrees and certificates for recruitment in state-run schools, officials said on Friday. "The government issued the sack order on Thursday and the services of 15,000 more teachers are likely to be terminated soon on the basis of ongoing inquiry into the fake certificates," said an official in the human resource development department (HRD). Following local media reports about candidates for teaching jobs having presented fake degrees, the government directed that all documents be verified by the concerned institutions or universities. The sacked teachers were appointed last year as part of the first phase of a recruitment drive for government-run schools. The state's Human Resource Development Minister Hari Narayan Singh said the government last week blacklisted 75 Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) institutions in India and Nepal to check the fake degree racket and irregularities in the ongoing second phase of the recruitment drive. An HRD department official said its 9,000 recruitment centres across the state had received more than 10 million applications for 93,000 teaching posts in the second phase. Singh said some of the blacklisted institutions are in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Punjab.