The education department of Uttarakhand would be adopting the criteria of State merit list for selecting primary teachers this time; earlier the recruitment was on the basis of district merit list. The department has recently released recruitment advertisement for filling 980 vacancies of primary teachers.
The department would make a State merit list of all the applicants on the basis of the year of their qualifying examination (B Ed/ B Ed special education and diploma in special education) and the marks scored in the Teacher’s Eligibility Test (TET). The department which earlier used to make a district merit list changed the long adopted practice in wake of the judgment given by the Uttarakhand High Court in State versus Triveni Chand Pandey case. Pandey appealed against the practice of making the district merit list in the recruitment process of primary teachers. The court on 26 November 2013 ruled that State merit list should be prepared for filling the vacancies.
In the last recruitment of primary teachers in 2011 many discrepancies occurred for example some applicants who did BEd as late as in 2010 were able to get jobs in remote districts while in the districts like Haridwar and Dehradun many applicants could not be selected even though the year of their doing BEd was 2006. The basis of this discrepancy was that the candidates were asked to apply only in the district of their domicile and the mountainous districts had less number of B Ed and TET qualified candidates than the more populous district of plains.
It is clear now that the B Ed and TET passed candidates of Dehradun; Haridwar and Udham Singh Nagar districts would be benefitted most by the new practice as they have large number of such candidates. M P S Bisht a BEd and TET qualified candidate belonging to Dehradun district told The Pioneer that the practice of making a State merit list is good as it gives equal chance to everyone. However, for those who are residing in the mountainous areas the new pattern would reduce the chances of getting jobs this time.