The government has brought nearly 7,500 state-aided Madhyamik schools under the Centre’s Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) by converting them to government-sponsored institutions but not a single school has received funds under the scheme allegedly because of the education department’s inaction.

“The Centre has released Rs 200 crore to the Bengal government for implementing the RMSA scheme. But money under it is yet to be disbursed to any of the schools,” an official overseeing the RMSA scheme in Bengal told Metro.

The four-year-old scheme aims to universalise secondary education, expand access till the secondary level, set up more schools, improve the quality of education and recruit teachers to ensure 35:1 student-teacher ratio at every school.

A school education department source said the Centre had released an initial corpus of Rs 200 crore a couple of months ago for implementing the scheme. An additional amount of Rs 50 crore will be released for the first phase.

The state-aided schools that have been converted to government-sponsored ones should have started getting the RMSA funds immediately after they were released by the Centre. But the government has been unable to disburse the funds to the schools because they are yet to start functioning as sponsored institutions in the absence of formalities to be completed by the education department.

To function as a sponsored institution, a school has to get its managing committee reconstituted in compliance with the norms set by the Centre under the RMSA scheme.

The education department is yet to issue a circular to the schools for reconstituting the managing committees.

“When the government took over our school, we were told that funds would not be a constraint. Our school was converted to a government-sponsored one several months ago but the education department is yet to seek any proposal from us for development projects,” the headmaster of a central Calcutta school said.

Under the RMSA scheme, schools are supposed to submit projects to the state government stating their requirements. Funds will be allotted to them for upgrading infrastructure — including libraries and laboratories — constructing classrooms and appointing teachers to maintain a student-teacher ratio of 35: 1.

The process of converting aided schools to sponsored ones started in 2012, following a circular issued by the Mamata Banerjee government to the 9,000-odd state-aided schools.

A source in the education department said the government had to take over the aided schools because the RMSA norms make it clear that only those institutions that are directly controlled by the state government would get funds under the scheme.

In Bengal, only about 102 schools — 42 government-run and 62 government-sponsored ones — were eligible for funds under the scheme.

Most state-aided schools are run by private bodies and receive grants from the state government to meet certain expenses, like salaries. The land and the expenses for infrastructure are arranged by the managements.

The government had announced last year that the process of conversion of all aided-schools to sponsored ones would be complete by July 2014. Around 1,500 aided schools are yet to be taken over.