KOHIMA: Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio has appealed to students’ organisations and village councils to extend cooperation to the government’s initiative towards rooting out bogus teachers.
A special investigation team (SIT) under the state vigilance commission found that the state government was losing Rs 25 crore on salaries of bogus teachers, he said.
Although the government was losing such a huge amount of money, the real losers were the innocent children, whose educational career was being compromised, he said. “We cannot compromise the educational career of our children", the chief minister lamented.
Pointing out that the SIT report enlisted four categories of teachers namely genuine, bogus, absentee and doubtful, the chief minister said the government decided to go for a special verification drive to differentiate the genuine and bogus teachers by constituting special verification committees (SVC) headed by deputy commissioners.
Rio was addressing the inaugural golden jubilee celebration of Northern Angami Students’ Union at Nerhema village in Kohima district yesterday.
Expressing concern over the prevailing practice of “proxy teachers” in the state, Rio challenged the students’ unions, village education committees and village councils to come up against the poor state of affairs in school education in the state and extend cooperation and support to the SIT and SVCs in eliminating the menace.
Pointing out that jobs in the government sector had already reached a saturation point, Rio called upon the educated youth to venture into self employment taking advantage of the government’s programmes such as capacity building, CM Corpus Fund, Year of Enterprise etc.
The chief minister said the government spends 70 per cent of its budget for the state employees, which comprises 10 per cent of the population, leaving only 30 per cent for the rest 90 per cent of the populace. He also lashed out at the government employees who were not attending their offices but drawing salaries.
Rio also expressed dismay over the prevailing practice among the Naga youth who either employ or lease out to “others” after setting up self-employed ventures. " Many youth employ others to look after them thereby becoming unemployed themselves again" , the chief minister lamented, adding this trend must be discontinued.
Rio said last year the government had sent 10 Naga youths for pilot-training outside the state and this year too the government was ready to send another 15 to 20 youths for similar programme. But unfortunately, the response from the youth to avail such an opportunity was very poor because only 18 applications were received last year, the chief minister regretted.
In this connection, Rio urged the village authority to identify genuine candidates for undergoing various trainings initiated by the government under its capacity building initiative.