Education Minister Taba Tedir informed the assembly on Thursday that 311 schools in Arunachal are lying defunct as per the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (U-DISE+) data of 2018-19. The minister also said that his department will shut down these schools in future and focus on strengthening the ones that are currently running. The figure of 311 is huge for a state like ours. It is sheer wastage of public money and it also shows how recklessly government funds are misused in the state. It is a well-known fact that most of these schools were constructed to make money by the contractors and in reality served no purpose.
Henceforth, before sanctioning any new schools, the education department should conduct proper feasibility surveys. The department should concentrate on improving the quality of education in the existing ones. The majority of the government schools do not have proper infrastructure. On the issue of subject teachers, the government has made some good progress by recently carrying out major a recruitment drive through the APPSC. This will definitely help to address the concern to a certain extent. However, the concentration of teachers in certain districts is also a major cause of concern. Going back to the issue of defunct schools, the department should check the condition of those schools and, if the buildings are in proper shape, they should be either auctioned or leased out. Not a single penny should go waste.