Chaibasa, March 5: Bengali may have been accorded the second official language status but Hindi still rules as the teaching medium in a school set up by the Bengalis here.

There are 14 teachers at Chaibasa Municipal Boys? Bangla School, which was built in 1913, but only four of them can impart teaching in Bengali. However, they prefer Hindi to Bengali as the medium of instruction.

The school, which was started by five Bengali families of the city on the rented premises of another respected Bengali family, has no headmaster for the past few years.

A senior teacher, who has been given the responsibility to act as headmaster on a temporary basis, does not even know Bengali.

District superintendent of education Ratan Kumar Mahabar told The Telegraph: ?There is no such school in the district where students are taught in Bengali. Moreover, in the particular school there are only around 60 Bengali-speaking students out of a total strength of 300.?

The five Bengali families not only established the school in the days of the Raj but also patronised the school for six years.

Other rich Bengali families of this Singhbhum town, too, contributed to the school?s fund to keep it running as a private school with imparting education from Class I to Class V.

In 1919, under the act promulgated by the then Indian government, this school came under the management of Chaibasa Municipality.

During that period, the functioning of the school, which has produced a lot of brilliant students in the past few decades, was monitored by the ward commissioner of the locality.

Gradually, after Independence, the school began loosing its original glamour with the government taking over the school in 1983.

The school, which has recently been renovated with funds given by local parliamentarian Bagun Sumbrai, still lacks the basic requirement necessary for a school.

Teachers are even forced to appeal to generous Bengali citizens to contribute whatever they can afford for smooth running of the Bengali-medium school where headmasters were brought from Hindi-medium schools only for few months before being transferred.

Since Independence and after the reorganisations of states, the Bengalis had few educational institutions in Bihar.

Before 1947, there were 10 Bengali-medium schools in Patna alone. However, there is only one such school left in the capital of Bihar.

The Bengalis had established few of these schools and still run four of them but these are no more considered as Bengali-medium schools.

No new Bengali-medium primary schools have been set up in the state, having 21 lakhs of Bengali-speaking population, in the past 30 years.

The number of Bengali-medium primary schools was reduced form 800 to 500 within a span of 10 years and high schools from 60 to 20 in the same period.