Bhopal: Several private schools in the interior rural areas of Morena district have become so ‘popular’ that hundreds of students from different parts of India have enrolled in them in the past one year to appear for the Class 10 and 12 board exams, alerting officials that they were part of the so called ‘tour school’ racket which is prevalent in the Chambal area of Madhya Pradesh.
Most of these students are from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. Morena, is situated 450 km from Bhopal, bordering Rajasthan.
Education department sources said that in these ‘tour schools’ the students do not have to attend classes and they are also guaranteed that they would be allowed to use unfair means and pass the exam. For this, they are charged anywhere between Rs 15,000 to Rs 80,000 depending on the marks they want to get.
Collector Morena, Bhaskar Lakshakar, said the district administration found 33 such schools, which are being called ‘tour schools’ in Morena, where 40,000 students from other states have enrolled for the board exam this year.
“We have also noticed that even those who had failed in board exam in previous years managed to pass when appearing from these schools. The pass percentage is over 80 percent, which is much higher than the overall pass percentage of the area leading to suspicion that they were using unfair means,” the collector said.
When the administration checked the antecedents of the students they found that in many cases these students had already cleared board exam from other states and were taking the board exam in Madhya Pradesh so that they get preference in jobs under the state quota.
{{/usCountry}}When the administration checked the antecedents of the students they found that in many cases these students had already cleared board exam from other states and were taking the board exam in Madhya Pradesh so that they get preference in jobs under the state quota.
{{/usCountry}}The collector even wrote to MP Board for Secondary Education (MPBSE) to cancel the affiliation of these schools. However, MPBSE didn’t do it to save the year of genuine students.
MPBSE chairman SR Mohanty said, “We have received information that registration of students have increased by many folds in 33 schools but we didn’t cancel the registration as already registered and genuine students will affect with this process but we have wrote to school education department to cancel the registration from next year.”
Now, the district administration formed a committee of officers to have strict vigilance on the centres of these schools and also fitted CCTv cameras which connected centrally with a monitoring room.
“Earlier, such students appeared in the exam from Bhind but after strictness in the district for the past two years, the cheating mafia shifted to Morena,” said Gagan Sharma, a government school teacher.