Patna, May 30: The results show it all.

The poor performance of government school students in the matriculation (Class X) results proved that the education department could hardly provide quality education.

This year, only 46.66 per cent of 15.47 lakh examinees passed the test, meaning by more than 50 per cent have failed to clear the test.

The matriculation results declared on Sunday was even unexpected for education minister Ashok Choudhary who said poor results reflect strict measures to check unfair means. Ashok said: "The results gave the actual picture of our students. Those who have cleared the examination will be able to clear the national-level competitive examination against those who used to pass matriculation with high percentage because of cheating or other unfair means."

According to Patna University retired teacher and economist N.K. Choudhary, the state government in the past few years has made a record in terms of enrolling students to schools but the poor students studying at government schools are still miles away from getting quality education.

Choudhary said: "There is a severe shortage of teachers at secondary schools. Even if there are teachers at secondary schools they are not much qualified as most of them are contractual teachers. Also, the teachers working at secondary schools are engaged in numerous non-academic activities such as looking after construction work of school buildings, working for government schemes during census and elections leaving no time for teaching."

The government, in the past few years, has launched various schemes in school education such as providing cycles to Class IX students, scholarships along with assisting in centrally schemes such as uniform, textbook distribution and others, but has no parameters to assess the quality education received by students.

Shankar Kumar, founding principal, Simultala Residential School, said: "The learning level of students at government schools is very poor especially in subjects such as mathematics and science. The poor performance of students in these subjects is due to experienced qualified students not going for teaching jobs at government schools."

Shankar said teaching job, especially at school is not lucrative as it was a few years ago. If a candidate, after completing MSc and BEd joins secondary school, gets around Rs 17,000 which is very less as compared to private or missionaries school offering teachers at the secondary level.

Apart from poor quality education, there are administrative loopholes too in the education system. Keshav Kumar, a teacher at government school at Dhaka block in East Champaran district and general secretary of Bihar Panchayat Nagar Prambhik Sikshak Sangh, said: "One of the reasons for poor performance of government school students is that they get textbooks late. It is almost May-end and in the next few days, the schools will go for summer vacation but students of classes III, VI and VII have not received their books."

However, the main reason behind the dismal performance is successive governments have treated education as a medium of their vote bank.

Former chief minister Jagannath Mishra said: "In the past 25 years, school education has witnessed a fall. Despite the fact that the government spending such a huge budget in education, the poor result is a cause of concern for people. There should be transparency, accountability and participation of society in education then only quality education can be provided."

Mishra's statement gains importance as the deteriorating performance of Bihar board students is over the years. The poor education quality of board students is reflected in the low percentage in clearing various competitive exams, especially IIT, medical and UPSC civil services entrance tests. According to reports, the top 100 students who have cleared the JEE for admission in IIT this year, comprise 50 CBSE board students. Similarly, 80 per cent of students clearing IIT came from three high school boards - CBSE, Andhra State Board and Punjab State Board - while in 2014 students from CBSE, Andhra, Maharashtra and Rajasthan state boards made it to the IITs.