More than 1,600 teachers in a north Indian state have resigned after a court told all educational staff with fraudulent qualifications to quit or face legal action.



Judges in Patna, the capital of the impoverished state of Bihar, ordered authorities on Tuesday to ensure that teachers who had obtained their posts with fake degree certificates, and who continued to work after the expiry of an effective amnesty, would face prosecution and action to recover their wages.

“The [teachers] resigned from their jobs fearing arrest and deduction of salary. All … had got jobs by submitting fake certificates and degrees,” Amit Kumar, a spokesman for Bihar’s education department, said.

India suffers from huge problems with fake degrees and other qualifications, as well as cheating in crucial exams for aspiring doctors.

Earlier this month, India’s highest court ordered the nation’s most powerful investigation agency to look into a massive college admission and government job recruitment scandal linked to dozens of suspicious deaths.

The accused in the case include senior police officers, local politicians, former ministers and top officials who are alleged to have rigged eligibility tests for admission to medical colleges and recruitment for coveted jobs in the police force, schools and banking sector. Police have also arrested hundreds of parents and students for paying bribes.

Local media have described the scandal as “without parallel” and “one of the most blatant and extensive rigging exercises of its kind ever uncovered in India”.

Officials in Bihar suspect that the number of teachers who have resigned is a fraction of those who have obtained their posts under false pretences. Most who handed in their notice were primary school teachers.

“The court order said no criminal and departmental proceedings will be initiated against such teachers, and salary will also not be recovered if they resign on their own within two weeks, but now this deadline is very much over,” Kumar said.

Last month a court in the state told local officials to investigate 40,000 teachers, all suspected of fraud. The government has admitted employing more than three times that number without checking if their qualifications were genuine.

Such problems are not limited to Bihar. In Assam, in India’s north-east, 200 teachers were fired from a single district last year for drawing salaries without attending their schools.

More than 50 people from the state of Haryana, including the chief minister, were recently convicted of running a corrupt teacher recruitment network.

There is ferocious competition in India for a limited number of government jobs, which often come with accommodation allowances and pensions, as well as for places in establishments offering specialist training. Weak oversight and a culture of bribery has undermined many professional institutions in the south Asian country.

Protection of whistleblowers is also a problem. In a report issued earlier this year, activists said 39 people who had used India’s Right to Information Act in the decade since it was passed in 2005 have been killed as a result of their inquiries.

Bihar – where a crucial state election is imminent – has struggled to overcome a range of intractable social and economic problems. Many affect children.

In 2013, more than 20 children died after eating food contaminated with pesticide residue in a school in Bihar.

The state also made headlines when images of hundreds of teenagers climbing walls of exam centres to help students cheat were published around the world. More than 300 people were arrested and 700 students expelled by embarrassed officials.