‘Ghost’ teachers settled abroad, but still on Gujarat payroll

More than 50 teachers in Gujarat’s government schools have migrated out of the country, but many of them reportedly continue to draw salaries from the government; not only are they not teaching children, they are not even present in their schools, or in the country. Out of 17 missing or ghost teachers, 12 are women and five men and three out of 17 have reportedly settled abroad,” a government official said. Chronic problem “We are serious about it and will take all necessary action against such teachers,” Gujarat Education Minister Kuber Dindor had said in response to the local media reports about the large number of absentee teachers in State-run schools. Centralised tracking After complaints about teachers skipping their classes or not turning up at school at all, the State government had set up a centralised command and control centre called Vidya Samiksha Kendra, to track the attendance of more than five million students enrolled in over 30,000 government-run and grant-in-aid schools, in which there are almost 2.5 lakh teachers whose attendance is tracked through GPS-enabled devices. After the media reports about missing teachers in Banaskantha and elsewhere, the State government claimed in a press statement that the absence of such teachers had been caught through its state-of-the-art command and control centre.