In a major crackdown, Uttar Pradesh education department officials on Monday shut down 103 schools which were neither registered nor recognized by any of the boards in the state.
Mukesh Kumar Singh, District Inspector of Schools (DIOS), and Amar Kant Singh, Basic Shiksha Adhikari, visited the identified illegal schools in eight different localities and sealed it after investigating that these were not running in legal manner.
Earlier, the department had issued notification to the schools not recognized by any of the boards in the state. Most of these schools were on the outskirts of the city and catered to low-income groups.
“Students of these schools will be shifted to the nearby schools. On the direction of the DM, the education department will be first closing down 225 schools which were already identified to be running illegally,” DIOS Mukesh Kumar Singh said.
“In the next step, action would be taken against 100 more schools if found to be illegally running during our investigation,” he added.
Maximum 26 schools were sealed in the Mall area of Malihabad followed by Kakori, Gosaiganj and Chinhat where 21, 17 and 12 schools were closed down respectively. In Sarojinagar, Malihabad, BKT and Lucknow three, five, thirteen and six schools were closed respectively.
According to reports, the UP Special Task Force (STF) had in February this year unearthed a fake education board that was running in Lucknow under the name of Uttar Pradesh State Open School Board (UPSOSB) since 2013 and had study centres in seven states.
A similar fake education board, Rajkiya Institute of Open Schooling (RIOS), was also busted in June 2017 in the state.
In 2013, the UP Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh had claimed that a fake examination board was running in different parts of the country, including UP. The board had granted affiliation to over 300 schools in India, including 12 in Lucknow.
