An almost three-decade-old education policy is seen to be the root cause of the recent Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) scam.

Under this "non-education policy", introduced in the 1980s during the regime of Jagannath Mishra, private educational institutes could open campuses without a single paisa help from the state government.

It led to mushrooming of colleges in the state - recognised either by universities or the BSEB. Teachers of these colleges in most cases are not given salaries and in most cases they give donations to the management for getting in as teachers. Like Vishun Roy College, Vaishali, many of these institutes have become epicentres of corruption and examination malpractices - first class and topper-producing factories even without having basic amenities of teaching.

The problem magnified when chief minister Nitish Kumar announced grants to these colleges on the basis of their performance.

These colleges, as per the state government incentive, gets Rs 4,000 annually for every candidate securing first division, Rs 3,500 for a candidate securing second division while Rs 2,500 for a student securing third division.

Sources said as these colleges don't get any financial aid from the state government in the past few years, there has been a mad rush among politicians, businessmen and trust to colleges at rural areas to set up colleges. These unaided colleges, apart from getting topper incentive from the government, also charges huge money from candidates promising them cent per cent success in Intermediate results. The sources said there are more than 2,000 such colleges in the state functioning from remote block headquarters lacks from basic infrastructure and going by the teachers' strength at such colleges, it is a Herculean task for the government to absorb such college teachers on government roll.

The newly appointed board chairman, Anand Kishor, said: "We have been witnessing anomalies in part of such college administration; we will streamline the system of such colleges. We will see that the colleges have all the basic infrastructure such a classrooms, toilets, quality of students and teachers will be monitored at regular interval."

The sources said apart from the government topper incentive, the other reason behind mushrooming number of such unaided colleges is that the state government had failed to open new colleges. Patna University retired professor N.K. Choudhary said: "In the past few decades, the government has hardly opened any new college. The only two colleges opened by the government in the past few decades are Government Girls' College at Gardanibagh and Gulzarbagh in Patna."

Though the government did not open any new colleges, many non-government colleges and private colleges were absorbed as constituent colleges at different phases. BD Evening College (Patna), JD Women's College (Patna), TPS College (Patna) were absorbed as constituent colleges later.

From 1990 to 2005, the sources said, the number of such private unaided colleges have witnessed a sharp increase. The teachers/staff from such colleges from time to time have been pressing demand before the state government to provide financial assistance, but the Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi regime at that time kept a silence on their demands.

In 2005, when Nitish came to power, there was a ray of hope for teachers from such unaided colleges. Shankar Kumar, the founder principal of Simultala Residential School, said: "In 2005, when Nitish came to power, he announced a policy under which an unaided college was to get Rs 4,000 per candidate who secured first division, the second division rate for candidate was Rs 3,500 and others."

However, the biggest drawback of the policy was that there was no mechanism to check the quality of students and such institutes. The end result of such colleges was that these colleges started becoming certificate-producing centre.

Also, with due period of time from 2010 these educational institutions started developing a strong nexus with school examination board and Intermediate council in producing large number of toppers.

Not only Vishun Roy College, which has been producing large number of toppers, many unaided colleges such as SNNR College Begusarai, BRS Mahila College in Samstipur among others, started producing toppers in a large number.