Enthused by National Council of Teacher Education’s (NCTE) decision to extend the waiver for Bachelor of Education (BEd)/Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) for becoming primary teachers till March 31, 2016, the BEd/TET Unemployed Federation has demanded that the Government add more posts in the current recruitment drive. In wake of new NCTE directive the federation which was adamant on completion of recruitment process before September 30, now wants that the Education department should take the required time to add 389 more posts before releasing final merit list.
On Saturday night, a delegation of Federation met with Chief Minister Harish Rawat at his residence and informed him that the Education department has not added 389 posts in the recruitment drive even though the State Cabinet had given its approval for the same in the month of March itself. The State president BEd / TET federation Baldev Singh Bhandari told The Pioneer that the Cabinet in its March 5 meeting had approved the posts but the department has not added them as yet. He said that CM assured them that he would ask the officials to add the seats. Meanwhile, the education department is all geared up to release the final merit list of the 2794 candidates for the special recruitment drive for primary teachers after the Uttarakhand High Court (HC) cleared all the legal hurdles.
The department is expected to release the list on Monday. Education department would follow the criteria of year wise seniority in the preparation of merit list and for the first time one merit list for entire state would be prepared instead of the usual practice of separate list for different districts. Bhandari said that since the September 30 deadline for recruitment no longer exist the education department should add more posts in the drive to give benefit to unemployed youths.
The NCTE’s relaxation has brought cheers to thousands of B.Ed. qualified unemployed youths in state who would now have a chance to become primary teachers in the state government.
There are more than 75,000 BEd qualified unemployed youths in state. NCTE gave special relaxation to Uttarakhand in its directive to employ only the Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed) qualified youths as the primary teachers as the state till recently had no institute which offered the D.El.Ed course. The state started the two year D.El.Ed. course this year in District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) this year only and the first batch would pass out in year 2016.