I want to start with the detail that still makes me stop and reread it. In Jacobabad, in 2019, two Sindh Education Department employees, a teacher and a peon, were declared dead so their families, or someone posing as their families, could collect death benefits. The payout came to Rs 4.9 million. A month later, both men turned out to be very much alive, and quietly resumed drawing their salaries as if nothing had happened. Nobody in the department noticed the resurrection either. An outside anti-corruption investigator caught it.
That investigator, ACE Assistant Director Masroor Jatoi, was looking into something else entirely when he found it, a man named Khoso who had been illegally inducted as a primary school teacher, invented sixteen years of fake service, then fraudulently retired and walked away with Rs1.6 million, helped along by staff in the Education and Finance departments and a bank official who should have asked more questions. Jatoi ended up opening thirteen separate cases against officials in both departments. He told a local reporter at the time that a proper look into just one account could unravel many more frauds like it. He was right, and seven years later, nobody in Sindh seems to have listened.
Fast forward to this year and the shape of the problem has not changed, only the zeros. In May, the arrest of the Controller of Examinations at the Mirpurkhas Board cracked open a scandal that investigators say moved roughly Rs200 million, including Rs36.5 million in bribes to former senior officials, in exchange for altered exam results. In Nawabshah alone, results for around 90,000 students were reportedly changed. One student applying for a medical college seat ended up with two different mark sheets from the same board, one showing 362 marks out of 500, the other showing 497. The province’s own Secretary for Universities and Boards was asked to explain his department’s records and simply didn’t show up, citing his own senior grade as the reason he didn’t have to.
It gets worse than mark sheets. A separate inquiry into the same Mirpurkhas board found officials had allegedly been issuing fake matriculation certificates for four straight years, thousands of them, some going to Afghan nationals who used them to obtain Pakistani identity cards and domiciles. That is not exam fraud anymore. That is a provincial education board functioning as an unofficial documents mill for people trying to acquire Pakistani identity papers they were never entitled to, and it ran for years before anyone in Karachi noticed.
And the department keeps proving it cannot even police its own hiring. In August, six fake secondary school teachers turned up on the payroll in Mirpurkhas, the same district that happens to be Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah’s own home constituency. In July, a suspended employee named Mohammad Ali was caught running a vendor company that billed schools for goods never delivered, submitting forged invoices under the names of district education officers. His prior disciplinary history, the reason he had already been suspended once, was getting caught cheating on his own matriculation exam. Sindh’s education department didn’t just fail to catch a cheat before he became an embezzler. It kept him on staff long enough to let him try again, this time with public money instead of an answer sheet.
What actually connects 2019 to 2026 is not the rupee figure. It is how every single one of these cases got discovered. Not through an internal audit that caught the fraud in progress. Not through the department flagging its own numbers. Through an investigator chasing something unrelated, a parent complaining about a mark sheet, an arrest that happened to loosen someone’s tongue. Sindh’s education department has now had seven years and two different ministers from the same party to build a system that finds its own rot before a journalist or a police officer stumbles into it. It still has not built one. Instead, it has issued press releases, promising strict action every time it gets caught, then waiting for the next account to unravel on its own.
Asma Bangash
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