The school education department has told all government-aided and government-sponsored schools to preserve records like the number of teachers for each subject and copies of the teachers’ service books.
A notification issued on September 29, two days after the high court asked the CBI to investigate alleged irregularities in the destruction of OMR answer sheets of candidates who had written the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) in 2014, says records pertaining to “service book and important litigation” merit permanent preservation.
Three categories have been drawn up by the directorate of school education in pursuance of a March 8 order from the state information commission. Out of the three, category ‘A’ mandates permanent preservation. The records or documents in the other two categories can be destroyed after a specified period.
The order says records coming the category “A are of utmost importance for the administrative purpose of the institution”.
An official in the school education department said 10 types of records feature under Category A. “Files/records containing major policy decisions of the school; Files/records relating to the staff pattern of the school; Files/records relating to the important litigation or ‘cause celebre’ (a controversy attracting a great deal of public attention) in which the school administration was involved; copies of service books and pension...” are under category A.
Category B includes copies of resolutions of the school management committee which are “of lesser importance”, attendance register of the employees and utilisation certificates of various grants. They need to be preserved for 12 years, after which they can be destroyed. But any document under category B “can be upgraded to category A for permanent preservation”, the notification states.“C classified records, like students’ register, medical record of students, need not be kept for more than two years, excluding the years of disposal”, the notification states.
An official in the department said that earlier it was left to the individual schools to decide which documents they would preserve and for how long, and which they would destroy.
“Increasingly schools are getting involved in important litigations. As a result, preserving certain records are of utmost importance,” the official said.