Successive State Government’s failure to achieve economic self-reliance over the years seems to have only hit the education sector in Uttarakhand.
The State Government must have heaved a sigh of relief after the employees of the Rashtriya Madhyamik Siksha Abhiyan (RMSA)having come down from the overhead tank in the State capital on Monday, but it is true that all the major flagships programmes of the Government have taken a back seat in the hill State.
For example, promoting yoga education has always been one of the priority initiatives of the successive State Governments. But no appointment of yoga teacher in the Government run schools has been made on regular basis. There are thousands of trained but unemployed yoga teachers waiting for appointment.
The State Government introduced diploma and degree courses in yoga in higher education in Uttarakhand in 2003-2004. There are thousands of students who have done degree or diploma courses in yoga. But no regular appointment of yoga teachers has been made. So we have been staging protest time to time to attract the attention of the Government but of no use, alleged Mahipal, a trained but unemployed yoga teacher.
The fact of the matter that books on yoga are being distributed in Government run schools free of cost. So our point is that if it does not want to appoint trained teachers, so what is the use of distributing books on yoga in schools for so many years spending crores of rupees, asked Mahipal.Similarly, the Central Government –assisted RMSA programme seem to have only become a casualty mainly for want of requisite funds.
The employees working under the much-talked about RMSA programme have been on the street since April 1, 2015, after the withdrawal of funding by the Central Government. Since then the trained but unemployed yoga teachers have been staging protest.However, showing his Government’s inability to run the RMSA on its own the state basic education minister Mantri Prasad Naithani had recently met the Union HRD Minister Smiriti Irani urging her to resume the Central funding for continuation of the RMSA in the state.
The programmes like RMSA have not only come in handy to promote basic education standard enrolling maximum children in schools, but also provided job opportunities thousands of educated youths.Now it is to be seen how the State Government resolve the RMSA issue in the times to come having little to offer except assurances.With its failure to run the programmes like RMSA or yoga education, poor condition of basic infrastructure of the Government run schools across the state only tell the tale of standard of education in the public sector schools in the mountain state.