The Karnataka unit of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is trying to eliminate leakage of funds to undeserving candidates and NGOs by putting all its programmes and activities on a web portal for public scrutiny.
The move has been taken up, after the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) found that funds earmarked under the residential special training programmes (RST) for Out of School Children (OOSC) were misused on a large scale in Kolar and Ramanagaram two months ago. Further, misuse has been identified in Gulbarga and four headmasters have been suspended there.
“We want to put everything online. Payments (or grants) will not be made until all the data is represented stepwise and all steps have been completed and verified,” said Subodh Yadav, SSA’s State Project Director.
“Officials will think twice before tweaking a file that already exists on a virtual platform. It works as a deterrent,” he added.
All the file work will now be paralleled with data that is uploaded on the web portal on usage of SSA funds. Five teams of programme officers and computer experts from within SSA will give structure to this plan.
Details of every programme, its activities, sub-activities and micro activities, financial outlays, civil works components, progress achieved and images will be uploaded on the portal that can be viewed publicly.
“We will use geographic information system images of schools that have received grants, so one can keep a check on the progress made in those schools. Also, we have started releasing grants directly to schools for various civil works and other schemes. Monitoring lies with the block and district officials, but we have managed to remove bottlenecks in distribution of grants,” Yadav explained.
Manjunath C B, social mobiliser with Need Base India, which works with the SSA on urban deprived children, is not completely convinced that the move is beneficial.
Going online would only cater to the agency’s administrative needs, he observed.
“Transparency will come in terms of administration, but can they keep a tab on the qualitative progress of the scheme implementation? I am skeptical,” he said.
Yadav said the plan would have some of its design elements in place by August.
“We need to target the imperfections within our system,” he admitted, referring to how lakhs of rupees allocated for mainstreaming OOSC have been allegedly misused in many districts in the state.
SSA has more than 17 interventions in the state, with OOSC being the flagship intervention where dropouts and never-enrolled-in-school children are identified and given bridge course before mainstreaming them.
The first signs of misuse were found in Kolar and Ramanagaram districts where schoolgoing children were shown as OOSC and were enrolled in long term (six, nine and twelve months) residential special training (RST) programmes.In Kolar, 350 children were shown as enrolled in the 12-month RST at a cost of `70 lakh and 140 children in Ramanagaram were shown in 12-month RST at a cost of `28 lakh.
The SSA has recommended the state government to initiate “disciplinary action” against the concerned officials in these districts.
In Gulbarga, DDPI T Jayaram suspended four headmasters – Rajashekhar from Kalabennur GHPS, Naganath Gaekwad from Patagera GHPS, Vittala from Kodla GHPS and Tarachanda from Yalasangi GHPS — for identifying school going children as OOSC.
“Perhaps, they were under pressure to meet the target of enrolling a certain number of OOSCs,” Jayaram further added.
