The Collector of the newly-formed Jayashankar Bhoopalpally district in Telangana was in for a shock, when he walked into an Industrial Training Institute (ITI) college there. Instead of a bustling educational atmosphere, he found a nearly deserted building yawning its emptiness in the middle of a working day.
On Monday, the collector, A Murali, walked into the institute to find all nine staff members of the college including the Principal, absent and missing.
This included both the teaching and non-teaching staff.
As far as the students were concerned, only nine out of 200 were present.
9/200 students present in classrooms n 9 staff members including Principal absent at JayaShankarBhupalapally ITI College #Telangana pic.twitter.com/qBSY7uv4Wu
— kavitha Rao (@iamKavithaRao) January 30, 2017
"This clearly shows the negligence of duties and requires disciplinary action," the collector's office said in a release, and suspended the entire staff including the principal.
It added that the suspension was due to "gross negligence to perform their legitimate duties."
"The Director of Technical Education (ITI) is requested to ratify the action, taken by the undersigned," it concluded.
Bhupalpally district Collector in #Telangana was shocked to see only 9 students out of 200 in ITI college an no staff present. pic.twitter.com/yve9OF8dKs
— dinesh akula (@dineshakula) January 30, 2017
This comes after a similar incident highlighting the poor quality of education in the state's district schools and colleges.
In the second week of January, the Mahbubnagar District Collector suspended five teachers of a government school, along with the headmaster, after it was found that Class 5 students could not even spell their names in English.
"While I was interacting with 5th-grade students, I was aghast to see that no child could write their and parents’ name; there was no timetable being followed in school, the workbooks of children were incomplete. The teachers completely failed to perform their duties," Collector Ronald Rose told News18.