Every morning since late July, Muhammad Tamizuddin has been setting out for the local marketplace with a stack of empty gunny sacks on his head, trying to sell them.

Tamizuddin is the principal of a government primary school in Kadwa block of Bihar’s Katihar district.

In a powerful voice, strengthened by years of teaching students, he calls out to people at Kadwa Bazar to buy the jute bags at Rs 10 apiece, pleading that he would otherwise not receive his salary.

But there are no takers because the sacks are either torn or have gaping holes made by rats. Tamizuddin has not sold a single jute bag yet.

Onlookers at the market find it strange that a school principal would be selling jute bags.

But Tamizuddin and thousands of other principals and teachers from Bihar’s 80,000 primary (Classes I-V) and middle (Classes VI-VIII) schools say they are merely following a state government diktat.

It’s a point Tamizuddin advertises through a placard that hangs from his neck. “I’m a teacher at a government school in Bihar,” it says. “I’m selling empty sacks on the government’s orders.”

The Nitish Kumar government has asked all district programme officers (DPOs) of the school midday meal scheme to ensure that the schools in their areas sell the jute bags in which food grains (rice and dal) had been supplied to them.

Satish Chandra Jha, director of the midday meal scheme, issued the letter on July 22, saying the accountant-general’s office in Patna had noticed that the empty food grain sacks were not being sold, costing the state in revenues.

The letter also asked the DPOs to ensure that all the empty sacks were sold at Rs 10 a piece and the money entered into the midday meal scheme ledger.

Attached with the letter were lists of the total allotment of food grains and the number of sacks in which they were sent to each of the state’s 38 districts for the midday meal scheme during financial years 2014-15 and 2015-16.

The total number of sacks comes to over 1.27 crore, and the government wants Rs 12.7 crore from them.

After receiving the letter, the DPOs wrote to the officers in charge of the midday meal scheme at the block level, who wrote to the principals of all government primary and middle schools.

The principals were told they would be charged with embezzlement and punished if they failed to sell the jute bags and deposit the money.

Many principals and teachers across Bihar are therefore out on the streets, hawking the sacks. Some have invited shopkeepers to come to their school and buy the sacks in bulk, but with little success.

The market price for jute bags of comparable size is Rs 20 apiece. But these bags, lying in the school storeroom since the March 2020 lockdown, have been damaged by floods, rats and the passage of time.

Teachers said the schools never sold these bags before.

“Most government primary and middle schools have no benches or desks. Our students have been using these sacks to sit on the floor during classes,” Manoj Kumar, acting president of the state primary teachers’ association, told The Telegraph.

He described the state government order as “objectionable and illogical”.

“Rats have nibbled through a large number of the sacks. The rodent attacks have increased because the schools have remained mostly closed during the pandemic. Nobody will buy these sacks,” Kumar said.

At a large number of schools in flood-prone areas, the sacks have rotted after being submerged in floodwaters, as in every monsoon.

Kumar said the state government should have either sold the empty sacks itself or taken them away at the end of every financial year.

Various associations of Bihar’s 4 lakh primary and middle school teachers are considering a state-wide agitation if the government fails to withdraw its directive on the jute bags.

Sanjay Kumar, additional chief secretary with the Bihar education department, told this newspaper he had ordered “departmental action against the teachers (including Tamizuddin) for indiscipline and behaving against the service code”.

“You cannot make a mockery of government rules. There have been audit objections about the lakhs of jute bags sent to the schools. They are an economic commodity and have to be accounted for,” he said.

Told of the claims about sacks getting destroyed by rats and floods or worn out by children sitting on them in classrooms, the official said: “We shall write them off if the teachers inform us about bags having got destroyed. But all the bags in the schools cannot have been destroyed.”

Under the midday meal scheme, children from Classes I to VIII were served a cooked meal at school every school day. The menu in Bihar was rice, dal, vegetables and, on certain days, eggs.

With the schools closed because of the pandemic, the government has been sending 2.2kg rice to every child’s parents once a month and depositing a sum — at the rate of Rs 4.95 a day for 22 days a month — with the families’ bank accounts towards oil and fuel.

The schools had opened for a few days late last year during a fall in Covid infections. In-person higher secondary classes have now resumed since August 6.