Fake enrollments in AP schools: HRD Ministry asks all states to 'cleanse' data

The Ministry has also asked the States to create a database of the school teachers along with their unique identification number. The instructions were passed on to the States during project approval board meeting for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan held by the Ministry recently.

The States began updating student wise data of the schools under them linking the student's data with their Aadhaar following an instruction from the Centre for developing an online system for collection and storage of the student information system (SIS) in 2015.

“As the exercise began in Andhra Pradesh, the State authorities found that about 3.33 lakh students were enrolled in more than one school. The duplicate names were removed from the database. This resulted in a significant decline in the enrollment figures of the state for all types of schools included private and unaided schools,” official sources told DH.

Several other States have reported a decline in the enrollment of students in government and government-aided schools. “This may be a trend due to several factors including parents preferring to admit their wards to private schools or shifting them from government schools to private schools. But the possibility of the fudging of enrollment data at school levels can not be denied,” official sources said.

As part of the move to create an online student information system, child wise data linking with their Aadhaar is being collected across the country. The HRD Ministry has recently launched an SSA-Shagun portal for monitoring of the scheme. All the States have been asked to upload the data on this portal and submit two hard copies of the data uploaded with the HRD Ministry.

“States have been asked to complete creation of online database this year by linking each student's information with his or her Aaadhar wherever available. In the case of students having no Aaadhar number yet, their data can be linked with some other identification proof. The development of online student information system is resulting in the massive cleansing of data,” sources said.