Another report said 21,000 students at Gurudoyal Govt. College of Kishoreganj are overcrowding in 34 classrooms at a time when shortage of 109 teachers have been also reported to suggest gross irregularities are at work. We also ran an editorial on the other day that said 45,000 posts of primary school teachers including over 17,000 head teachers are falling vacant in 64,000 government schools across the country.
This is a highly terrible picture of our education system from public university to primary school level when the education sector is sitting on a huge annual allocation of Tk 49,009 crore in 2016-17 budget. Our question is — the government is allocating huge budget every year and yet primary schools, government colleges and public universities are lacking basic infrastructure like classrooms, libraries and laboratories. Disclosure said many primary schools have dilapidated buildings across the country and teachers take classes in open air. The question is where so much money is going and why the government is failing to create adequate facilities despite having enough budgetary resources.
It is no secret that dishonest officials and contractors are grabbing the bigger part of development budgets of schools, colleges and public universities. Ruling party men and leaders of their student front are taking the lion’s share of development budget when contractors get the tender and quarrel about benefit sharing often end up in violence stalling the progress of work at many places.
It appears that the entire system is now over-run by corruption, indiscipline and misuse of budgetary resources where making wealth overnight is dominating the scene. Question leakage is common then holding fair public examinations. Poorly educated men with party link are getting jobs instead of qualified candidates and buying certificates now easier than passing out exams through hard labour. It amply explains why we have enough resources and yet most infrastructures are lacking for schools, colleges and public universities.
Our concern is that the country must have enough skilled workers to meet demand of our expanding business and industries. We are already receiving huge number of foreign skilled and semi-skilled workers and technicians to meet shortage of trained manpower. But if the government lacks the leadership to create an efficient education system to create manpower, it is just awful and it needs quick improvement.
