Not Enough Teachers to Educate India

Via livemint.com

Roop Singh Taroke, huddled in the back rows of a damp and congested classroom, drew a blank at the mention of a geometry box and looked to his teacher for help.

At the upper primary school in Amazhir village, only 30 students out of the 180 enrolled in classes I to VIII had turned up the morning after Raksha Bandhan, along with a guruji, or guest teacher.

The lanky Roop Singh Kharte, all of 20 and the lone guruji present, smiled nervously at Taroke. “I teach only Hindi,” he told the 15-year-old, before turning to a group of class II students clamouring in a corner.

Taroke, son of a farm labourer and a class VII student, had never seen an instrument box in his life although the math textbook has a chapter on geometry. Still, a student not having geometry box doesn’t seem like such a big deal. What’s more important is that there aren’t enough teachers.

One of the cornerstones of the Union government’s social welfare agenda, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) aims to put every Indian child in school. On 26 February, SSA will find prominent mention in finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget, given the Manmohan Singh government’s focus on inclusiveness.

In Amazhir, the challenges involved in implementing the programme are starkly apparent. In four bare rooms, a teacher conducts two classes at a time. Two of the four teachers have been hired on a year’s contract, including Kharte.

An undergraduate student at a college in Bhopal, the state capital about 80km away, Kharte teaches at the school during vacations for Rs150 per class.

Not the kind of remuneration that makes for regular attendance. Contract teachers, also known as “para” teachers, don’t turn up when the village gets cut off by heavy rain or at festival time, say parents.

Not surprisingly, 48 out of 374 government schools in Sehore's Nasrullaganj block, of which Amazhir is a part, have no teachers, according to the Madhya Pradesh government website.

Fifty-two schools have one teacher each, in violation of SSA norms. Only about 37 schools have more than four teachers each. "In 1997, when the government found the teaching vacancies were too many and they had scant resources, they adopted a recruitment policy which favoured para teachers," Sadgopal said.
"The number of such teachers has increased alarmingly over the last few years. It's making the whole education system unstable."

The instability that Sadgopal refers to has been caused by underqualified and untrained teachers who have no job security.

In most states including MP, the minimum educational qualification for para teachers has been lowered to class XII (and class X for women), thus doing away with the minimum qualification of a bachelor of education degree.

Salaries are irregular and incentives have dwindled to zero, he said. "These are times of financial famine for teachers. The government says it has no money to pay us. Our festivals have no colour," Barkhare said.

School officials, however say, the system ensures lower absenteeism and better quality since the para teachers risk being fired for neglecting work.

"With permanent jobs, teachers slacken a bit," said Kedar Singh, principal of the Sarvodaya Government School in Bhopal.

However, various studies on para teachers including a 2006 report released jointly by the World Bank and National Institute of Educational Planning and Research, describe the system as a cost-cutting measure. Each para teacher deployment costs the state one-fifth that of a regular teacher in Madhya Pradesh.

Notably, teachers' salaries are not covered under SSA, but left to the state governments to fund.

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