Education dept determined to give biometric system a go

Province-wide action against ghost employees will be taken within a month

KARACHI: Colleges in some districts of Sindh have been directed to install the biometric system within 10 days, according to a notification issued by the Sukkur regional director of colleges on January 3.

The notification read that in case of non-compliance of the orders, principals of the colleges will be held responsible.

The provincial education department completed on March 1, last year, the biometric registration of its employees that included teaching and non-teaching staff.

"We will be taking action against the declared ghost employees who have not registered themselves in the system," school education secretary Jamal Mustafa Syed told The Express Tribune. Some of them will lose their jobs while the salaries of others will be stopped too, he said, adding that the ghost employees will see the results of the education department's action within one month.

Meanwhile, the secretary for college education, Riaz Ahmed Memon said that the installation of the biometric system in colleges is in process will be completed soon.

More than 212,000 employees were registered in the biometric verification system while the remaining persons were declared ghost employees by the education department.

From the total, 149,100 people were teaching staff and 45,485 non-teaching staff while biometric registration of 7,838 teachers and 8,210 other employees from colleges was also done from which more than 1,000 employees could not be registered who were among the ghost employees in college education.

This verification system was introduced in 2015 to ensure the attendance of teachers in schools and colleges and identify ghost teachers in the education department who were drawing their salaries without performing their duties in the schools and colleges they were appointed in.

"The biometric verification system will help segregate the genuine employees from the ghost employees," said the then minister for the department, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro.

Earlier, at a report launch in 2016, former education department secretary Dr Fazlullah Pechuho said that there were around 6000 teachers who did not turn up for their biometric verification because they were ghost employees and feared action against their deeds.

According to the education department data, a total of 40,095 schools had registered with biometric out of the 46,039 schools. The schools which were not registered are mostly non-viable schools.

Department's watchdogs

The department had also appointed 225 monitors in April 2016 for the biometric verification. They were inducted on a two-year contract to monitor the conditions and performances of schools and attendance of teaching and non-teaching faculty across the province. The step was taken mainly to make biometric verification workable and to recognise ghost teachers and absconders.

The monitors were tested, interviewed and recruited by the Sukkur Institute of Business Administration. The 16 districts in which the monitors were appointed initially included Dadu, Hyderabad, Qamber Shahdadkot, Khairpur, Mirpurkhas, Naushero Feroz, Karachi Central, Malir and East. Monitors for the rest of the 14 districts in Sindh were to be inducted by June, 2016 while until now, only the test for the monitors has been held and no inductions have taken place.

Improving standards

An Android application, 'Sindh School Management System', was also formed by the monitoring and evaluation department which was accessible to all the monitors with separate identification and passwords to access the data, such as the number of schools, enrolments and facilities.

The monitors had to evaluate the progress of the schools, keeping three factors in view- facilities such as toilets, boundary walls and water, attendance of the teaching and non-teaching staff as per the biometric system and enrolment, separately for boys and girls.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2017.