Malda, Nov. 7: Teachers of 135 government-aided schools are likely to go without their salaries for another month as the institutions have failed to respond to audit-related queries.

The district treasury had objected over the way the schools were not abiding by the government rule. Most of them had not conducted any audit for the past 10-15 years.

The inspector of schools in Malda, Chinmay Sarkar, admitted the “lapse on the part of the schools”. He said he had asked all the schools to submit their audit reports to the treasury by October 31. There are 333 high and junior high schools in the district.

“Of them, salary bills of only 198 had so far been sent to the treasury as they submitted papers on time. I am not sure whether teachers of the remaining schools will get their salaries this month,” Sarkar said.

The treasury has also alleged that most of the schools were not following the specified staff pattern. The government rule says that 50 per cent of teachers of a particular subject in a school are entitled to the higher salary grade because of their qualifications. However, in most schools, almost all the teachers are drawing the higher salary, though they may have been recruited for a lower grade.

Each school is supposed to submit its annual demand for the grant-in-aid to the district inspector of schools. But most of the schools ignore it.

According to treasury officials, the basic salary of an ordinary graduate starts from Rs 4,500, while that of an honours and a post-graduate teacher begin from Rs 5,500 and Rs 6,000 respectively. But teachers had been overdrawing more than Rs 1 crore every year in Malda for not following the staff pattern rule.

The government had sent a 21-point circular to the teachers debarring them from giving private coaching. But most of them tend to ignore this too.