Barely a month after the toppers scam in Bihar where Class XII Arts ‘topper’ pronounced political science as “prodigal science” and called it the science of “cooking”, the state has once again hit headlines for wrong reasons. This time, the situation is even more embarrassing. Dozens of principals of government-run and middle and high schools failed to do simple calculations and frame a sentence in English. This happened in a meeting called by Patna District Magistrate Sanjay Kumar to discuss ways to improve the quality of education in the schools. But to his surprise and disbelief many heads of the schools could not answer simple questions. While a principal could not correctly calculate the pass percentage of his school, others failed to calculate an average of students’ and teachers’ attendance. Another principal did not even understand a question the district magistrate asked in English; forget about replying it correctly.

Kumar expressed concern over the poor quality of teachers and called it “disturbing”.

“Whatever has come forward is extremely disturbing and a matter of concern. It has exposed the poor quality of school principals who are responsible for teaching students. It was shocking for me. How can such a teacher with poor knowledge teach our children in a school,” he said.

This is not the first time when the quality of teachers in the state was exposed. In last two to three years, there have been several media reports that teachers in several government-run schools cannot spell the days of a week and months of a year; some can't even spell apple or grapes.

For a teacher in Bihar’s Gaya district Pratibha Patil was the president till 2014 and the then Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani was the governor of the state. Shocked with the answer, the district magistrate ordered a probe into the authenticity of the teacher's qualification based on which she got a job in a government school.

Recently, Buxar District Magistrate Raman Kumar had to face the same situation when he was inspecting a government-run primary school in Rajpur locality.

During conversation with the principal, he realised that she was mispronouncing certain words. The officer asked her to write the words ‘Aashirwad’ and ‘Namaskar’ in Hindi. But she could not write despite repeated attempts.

The level of education in the state is going down so low despite the fact that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Education Minister Ashok Choudhary have repeatedly said that “the government is committed to provide quality education by improving the quality of teachers through training”.

A total of 29,700 teachers appointed on contractual basis in 2006 without any written test or viva on the basis of their B.Ed. and D.Ed. degrees or marks obtained in pre-university and university were subjected to undergo an eligibility test after the news reports started surfacing that most of them are not even have basic knowledge general knowledge.

Interestingly, 2,734 of them have already appeared and could not clear the test in two attempts.

If they fail in the third or final attempt, their services would be terminated.