Over 1 lakh students were found absent during the recently concluded school student audit in Pune district. Pune district collector Vikas Deshmukh announced the figure while speaking to the media in the city on Friday.
Students in 6,615 schools were counted by the district authorities at the three-day audit conducted earlier this week.
“The student strength of these schools as submitted by the school authorities during the first week of August 2011 was 16,19,998. At the end of the three-day audit, the figure was found to be 14,93,149, which comes to around 7.83% absentees,” he said.
The statewide exercise was ordered by the state government, after a case of bogus students were uncovered in Nanded during a similar audit conducted there in September. According to Deshmukh, zilla parishad schools had reported 5% absenteeism and 15% was noticed in areas under Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad municipal corporations. Private aided and un-aided schools reported 7% absenteeism and 10% absenteeism was reported from residential ashram schools in tribal areas.
However, he refused to draw any inference from these figures.
“The state government had asked us to conduct the student audit, and we did so. The government would analysis the data and come to a conclusion soon,” he said.
The exercise was carried out by more than 4,000 government employees, barring those of education department. Around 860 teams, with five members each, were formed to conduct the audit.
“Although cases of absenteeism were reported from various parts of the districts, we did not find any major case of fraud like whole sections or classes missing from schools. Also, no case of bogus teachers was found in any of the schools,” he said.
Certain areas of the district like Junnar had scored 100% students in all the schools, Deshmukh said.
During the audit, it was found that certain institutions like the Fergusson College had declared holiday for students of the junior college. Deshmukh said that the college had stated that the classrooms were necessary for the October supplementary exams and thus the students were on leave.
“I have asked the deputy municipal commissioner of PMC, Kundalik Karkar, to investigate the matter and send us a report,” he said.
The divisional commissioner, Dilip Band, said that the consolidated report of the audit for the Pune division would be ready by Monday.
