Vizag: Government funds for poor kids' education misused

Visakhapatnam: In what could be a case of misappropriation of government funds, 672 mandal education officers and others have not furnished utilisation certificates for Rs 22.5 crore. The money was drawn under various schemes of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan up to the 2015-16 financial year and was to be spent on poor students. It came to light during a scrutiny of SSA accounts.

Several organisations like the District Rural Development Agency and officials such district and deputy district education officers and mandal parishad officers have roles in the fund deficiencies.

As per SSA norms and AP Financial Code Volume-I, any advance has to be settled within three months along with a consolidated utilisation certificate signed by the authority concerned besides returning the remaining balance. But these bills have been outstanding for many years until recently.

As per the memos issued by the SSA state project director, which are available with Deccan Chronicle, DEOs have not initiated action to recover the pending advances from mandal educational officers despite repeated letters. The project director asked DEOs to recover the funds with interest from the salaries of MEOs for the inadequate book-keeping.

“Whenever an administrative authority holds that an employee is responsible for a loss sustained by the government, it should consider whether the whole or any part of the loss should be recovered from him in money and also whether any other form of disciplinary action should be taken,” the memo said.

A source from the APSSA has informed that due to not spending the available funds and not furnishing the utilisation certificates, the Union Government had suspended release of about Rs 1,000 crore in funds this year for APSSA. “These fund deficiencies were noticed by the new state project director and he was keen on recovering all the funds. SSA was launched with a noble goal of providing universal access to primary education and augmenting the infrastructure at schools. But due to alleged mis-utilisation of funds and funds lying dormant, we could not fully achieve our goals in the state,” the official added.