PATNA: India’s Bihar state has sacked 1,100 school teachers in the last five years for faking their own education qualifications, an official said on Tuesday.

Bihar’s government has launched an investigation into the eastern state’s primary and secondary teachers to check the authenticity of their degrees, the official said.

“We have removed about 1,100 school teachers in last five years in the state for using forged degrees to get jobs,” senior state education official R.S. Singh said.

“Our investigation is on to verify degrees of more school teachers. It is a continuous process after recruitment of teachers,” Singh said.

The sackings underscore the immense problems facing the school system in India where teachers are underpaid and overworked, and tens of millions of children struggle to receive an adequate education.

The investigation was launched in the wake of a massive recruitment drive by the government in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished and underdeveloped states, that started in 2006 in a bid to improve its schools.

The recruitment drive saw almost 250,000 people given teaching, assistant teaching and other jobs, but ultimately led to complaints about incompetence, officials said.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2014