Sexual assault on school girl unfortunate: Swarup

Union School Education Secretary Anil Swarup today termed the sexual assault of a four-year-old girl at the G D Birla Centre for Education as "unfortunate" but said the Centre had no role to play in matters related to private schools in the states.
The state government would have to look into the incident as the the Centre had no control over the matters of private schools, Swarup told reporters here.
"The incident is really unfortunate. The state governments give registration to these private schools and the Centre has no role here," he said.
There were a handful of government schools across the country over which the Centre had control, he said.

The four-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in a toilet of the premier private school here and two physical training teachers were arrested following protests by parents.
Swarup said there was a need to look at the pre-school system of education which has so far not developed in the country.

He was impressed by a city pre-school and Swarup said there was need to look into its model. He also stressed on the need to weed out mafias in education.
"When I was the coal secretary I saw the mines were underground and the mafias above. In education, I find the mafias are underground in the form of B.Ed and D.Ed colleges", he said.

Recently, the National Council of Teachers Education (NCTE) was asked to seek affidavits from 16,000 B.Ed colleges across the country but only 12,000 of them responded, he said.
Swarup said bogus colleges were giving away degrees by taking money but they carried no value. "We show-caused 1000 of them", he said.
Teachers are the pivot in the education system, he said and favoured a central examination for ranking them in terms of performance.
This is in the discussion process, he said.
There was also need for a total change in the induction curriculum, Swarup said adding that the NCERT and CBSE were working on it.