50 ghost schools unearthed in one district of Balochistan alone

QUETTA: At least 50 ghost schools were unearthed in Balochistan’s one district alone, whose the staff is receiving salaries, costing millions of rupees to the national kitty.
Secretary Secondary Education of Balochistan Abdul Saboor Kakar said on Wednesday that hundreds of bogus entries of students were also unearthed in some other districts of Balochistan and the data of teachers-students in the Balochistan Educational Information Management System (BEIMS) was also found counterfeit and obsolete, Kakar said.
“As many as 50 schools were not found on the ground and there was huge difference of students and schools in the data of BEIMS,” he said.“I visited a school in a district, some 50 kilometres from the provincial capital where according to data 1,800 students were enrolled whereas the real strength of the school was not more than 900,” the secretary deplored.
The requirement of textbooks, furniture and stationery, he said, was placed for 1,800 students. The ghost teachers were deployed, salaries were drawn as per the data and the practice would have cost millions of rupees annually to the public exchequer, he added.
“We have 10,000 primary schools, 1,000 middle schools and 900 high schools in Balochistan,” the secretary education said and lamented that due to a huge gap between primary, middle and high schools, 18 percent of children hardly reach to the matriculation level.
“To bridge this gap, we have to identify ghost schools and build hundreds of more middle and high schools,” he added.The NAB during investigation into the missing book scam has already expressed dissatisfaction and pointed out flaws in BEIMS data. Enrolment of students only in Quetta district was 10,000 less than the demand placed for books during the year 2014, NAB official said.