Amritsar, November 9
With the surrender of main suspect Suba Singh, the clerk in Government Senior Secondary School, Akalgarh, Dhupai, the exact role of former principals, bank and government treasury employees would get clear in the Rs 40-lakh GPF scam. Suba Singh is suspected of siphoning off money from the GPF accounts of 20 teachers and four non-teaching school employees by forging their signatures since 2007.

He surrendered before the Baba Bakala court two days back.

The alleged scam came to light a week ago when the audit teams from the AG office came to scrutinise the school records between 2005 and 2010. Suba Singh, reportedly, had gone underground since then.

The present and former principals of the schools, who also hold the Drawing and Disbursing (DDO) powers, alleged that Suba Singh withdrew the money from the GPF accounts.

It has evidently been found that the DDO powers of another Government Middle School, being operating from the same premises, too wrested with the principal of the senior secondary school under question and three more teachers of middle school had fallen victim to this fraud.

According to information, an amount of about Rs 9 lakh belonging to the GPF accounts of three teachers --- Jarnail Singh, Amarjot Kaur and Surinder Kaur --- have been fraudulently withdrawn with the same modus operandi.

The police sources said an amount of Rs 4.5 lakh has been siphoned off from the account of Jarnail Singh.

In a latest development, the District Education Officer has ordered to stall the service benefits of one of the ex-Principals, Kartar Singh, who got retired in March last.

It is pertinent to note that an amount of Rs 16.85 lakh has been withdrawn ‘fraudulently’, when Kartar Singh was the head of the school and was holding all drawing and disbursing powers.

Meanwhile, the present Principal Rani Gill has, reportedly, been instructed to maintain a status quo with the school records, by the AG, Punjab office.

Tarn Taran, November 9
Normal teaching work at Government Senior Secondary School, Shahabazpur, 20 km from here, has badly been affected due to a shortage of teaching staff. Shahabazpur, being a big village in the district, has been allotted medical, non-medical, commerce and humanity groups up to class XII.

There were more than 1,000 students here and out of these, more than 600 students were studying in classes XI and XII.

According to information collected by this correspondent, out of the 14 sanctioned posts of lecturer for higher classes, seven were lying vacant.

These posts include one each of history, political science, physical education, biology, chemistry and physics. The lone lecturer of English has been shifted to the DEO office for supervising schools.

Keeping in view the strength of the students here, the department has sanctioned two posts of teacher of chemistry and physics.

Village sarpanch Gian Singh said the situation in high classes also was not so good in the school as all the three posts of mathematics teacher were lying vacant since long, besides two vacancies of social studies masters and one each of DPE, science and drawing teacher.

Gian Singh said the matter had been brought to the notice of the state government and the Education Department so many times but nothing had been done.

Students from as many as 32 villages came here for studies.

Amritsar, November 9
In the absence of buyers from other parts of the country, the organisers of the annual Divali animal fair as well as the farm owners were a disappointed lot. Nukkran and Marwari breed of horses ruled the fair organised at Vallah here. The two horse breeds were major attractions in the fair as they are a craze among the youth in the rural belt, said Sukhpal Singh Gill of Gill Stud Farm. Majority of persons, who visited the fair for purchasing horses were youths, said Gill adding that there was mix response to the fair.

Ravinder Singh Sidhu, another owner of Stud Farm pointed out that only 25 per cent of total horses exhibited during the fair were sold while they had to move their best horses back to the farm due to lack of outside buyers who usually flock such fairs during Divali and Baisakhi to buy ponies which they sell further to other parts of the country. A good horse fetches anything above Rs 10 lakh but this time buyers were preferring ponies rather than purchasing fully grown horses.

“We suffered huge losses as buyers and traders from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan did not come. We will not call a bid during next auction of the mandi,” said Mohammad Imran, the contractor from Uttar Pradesh who was awarded the auction for organising the mela for a year by the district administration for Rs 80 lakhs.He said till now just 850 cattle including horses, cows and buffaloes were sold out of thousands of the animals arrived at the mandi. American, Gersy and Sahiwal cows which were used to be sold above Rs one lakh were traded at just between Rs 70,000 to Rs 75,000.

Baba Joginder Singh, owner of a dairy farm who displayed one of the costliest cows worth Rs 1.7 lakh at the fair failed to sell his milch animals as the buyers did not turn up during the four-day event.

“Whatever the traders showed up during the fair, they could not bargain even near the fixed rates which forced us not to sell our livestock,” said Joginder Singh.

Amritsar, November 9
Buoyed by the overwhelming response in the recently-concluded Ranjit Avenue Scheme, the Amritsar Improvement Trust (AIT) is all set to come with a slew of development plans for the city.

The design for raising super deluxe flats in New Amritsar, located at the mouth of the city on Amritsar-Jalandhar GT road, was selected out of all India entries from 18 contestants.

Of them, the design from a Chandigarh-based company was selected.

The proportion of the total area of construction, to the open space, would be 20:80. Costing Rs 45 lakh, a flat would have three bed rooms, a dining room, a store and a servant room, with all rooms having attached bathrooms.

Chairman, AIT, Sanjiv Khanna said these flats would differ in the respect that they would be maintained by residents in shape of the society, which would get a certain amount from the trust in the shape of fixed deposits.

The interest would be utilised for the upkeep of the flats.

These flats would have state-of-the-art security system in the shape of biometric appliances and other security paraphernalia. It would be a self financing scheme, he quipped.

On the other hand, 150 flats for lower, middle and higher income groups would be raised in the Kabir Park locality, situated opposite the Guru Nanak Dev University. He informed that the trust would spare 3,000 square yards for public utility.

Meanwhile, the AIT’s ambitious proposal also includes an auditorium in the Ranjit Avenue, two flyovers and a railway over bridge. He said these plans were at proposal stage and would be implemented after taking due approval.

Currently, the city has its spacious auditorium located close to the bus stand. The next auditorium is proposed to cater to the rising needs of the city. The flyovers are mooted from Four S Chowk to Children’s Ward, and from Lohgarh to Beri Gate.

Besides, the railway over bridge may come up from Gol Bagh to Civil Lines.

Amritsar, November 9
The 25-member Village Science Club at Tirthpur village, 14 km from this city, has taken upon themselves the task of awakening and educating nearly 500 natives of the village. The club, which was founded this July only, turned the 500-metre square village school land, previously under the bushes, into a beautiful garden.

Club coordinator Pankaj Sharma, also teacher at the Government Elementary School, said since he joined the institute he had been receiving complaints from the school children of sighting snakes.

The matter perturbed him as he also noticed them in the school but there was no mechanism to curtail their movement as they swiftly vanished in the bushes.

Some dwellers of the village, namely Nihang Pritam Singh, a former panchayat member, sarpanch Jarnail Singh, Balwant Singh, Sukhdev Singh, Maninder Kaur and last but not the least 21 students of the school, came together and freed the land from the unwanted growth of bushes.

Balwant Singh supplied ornamental, vegetables and medicinal saplings to plant on the land just before the onset of the monsoon this year.

As the plants grew, it gave an eye-catching view to the villagers who found the move as reviving link to the nearly five-decade school.

“With the material progress, majority of the villagers send their wards to the private schools in the adjoining city. The facelift and associated campaign to make them aware of their immediate environment beckoned them to pay a visit to the old school,” Sharma added.

The organically grown vegetables are being used in mid-day meal to provide nutritious diet to the students. For fertiliser, cattle dung and ash of cow dung were used.

However, the road to success was beset with troubles. There was invariably a lurking fear of the saplings being consumed by loitering animals as the school boundary wall was badly broken. The solution was found in assigning the group of students to alternatively guard the place after school hours.

The four-member of the club --- Simarjeet Singh, Group Leader, Kanwaljeet Kaur, Jatinder Pal Kaur and Jashan Preet Singh --- along with their guide teacher Sharma submitted the entire project as a report for the district-level competition of the National Children Science Congress.

Out of 34 reports, the club earned the second position in the junior wing. The report was on Community Knowledge on Land Use under the broader theme of ‘Land Resources: Use for prosperity, save for posterity’.