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The teacher-student ratio, a measure of quality of education, which is already abysmal at 1:21, is set to worsen after the discovery that nearly a tenth of teachers employed in higher education turned out to be ghost teachers. Around 130,000 teachers were found to be fake. India has about 1.4 million teachers in colleges and universities. While the good news is that this will lead to a focus on improving the quality of teaching, the bad news is that the country has just found out that understaffing in higher education institutes is far greater than what has been estimated so far.

Cheating by students who use essay mills is “virtually undetectable”, according to a study that found that many ghost-written papers would receive good marks if they were submitted. An associate lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales, conducted an experiment in which she ordered essays from 13 ghostwriting websites and then had them graded by leading academics who believed that they were looking at genuine student submissions. The results were “alarming”, with the quality of purchased essays being “higher than expected”; The use of essay mills might therefore be “much, much higher” than previously thought.

Three more cases of unlawful appointments in the Rawalpindi education department have been unearthed. According to sources in the education department, three fake women teachers have been hired for a high school for boys. The Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) is already investigating the appointment of 50 fake teachers in the education department in Kallar Syedan. The Executive District Officer has launched an inquiry into the bogus appointments, an official in the education department on condition of anonymity said.

The Sindh education department has decided to recover the funds disbursed in salaries to ghost teachers using its biometric attendance system. Sindh education secretary boasted that Sindh is the only province in the country to have biometric attendance in the education department.

A senior US official has called for independent verification of Afghan government figures on the use of US education aid following claims by Afghan ministers that the previous government had provided data on US-funded school and higher education projects that were flawed, tempered and exaggerated, and had interfered with university entrance exams. These allegations suggest the existence of ghost schools and teachers that are being paid for with US aid money.

Macquarie University has revoked the degrees of two students and prevented a further 10 from graduating after an independent investigation revealed the students used an online ghost-writing service to complete their assignments. The Northern Sydney University is the latest institution to finalise its internal investigations into the MyMaster cheating racket, in which up to 1,000 students from 16 universities hired the online company MyMaster to write their assignments and sit for online tests.

The Medical Council of India has asked state counsels to investigate the problem of “ghost” teachers in medical colleges following the discovery of more than 400 fake teachers in four colleges in three states. These “ghost teachers” are registered as faculty members drawing a hefty salary, but have never taken a single class. Most of them run private clinics, and only attend the college when there is an impending medical inspection.

At the helm of the company embroiled in a large-scale academic cheating scandal is a Chinese-born businesswoman. The enterprising 30-year-old has used her accounting degree to build a lucrative ghostwriting service, called MyMaster. This pitch has seen the MyMaster company turn over at least $160,000 during 2014 and return more than 900 fraudulent assignments to students prepared to hand over up to $1,000 for the work.