The decision of National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE) to make it mandatory for the colleges offering Bachelor of Education (BEd) degrees to provide Aadhar details of their faculty members is causing discomfiture to private colleges.
The order from the apex body of teacher education was recently circulated to all the BEd colleges. The order clearly directed the colleges to submit affidavits mentioning the name, number and qualification of their faculty members along with their Aadhar link numbers.
The NCET was forced to pass these orders in view of large number of complaints it received about ghost faculties in many colleges. A ghost faculty is a fictitious faculty which is on the rolls of a college especially private but not actually discharging duties of a teacher. Such faculty members make their appearance only at the time of inspections of NCTE. These fictitious faculty members are usually enrolled in many colleges at the same time.
It is worth mentioning here that the NCTE mandates that a B.Ed. college with a student strength of less than 100 must have 8 faculty members (7 teachers+ 1 Principal) and the college with more than 100 students should compulsorily have 16 members (15 teachers+1 Principal). These members of faculty should be suitably qualified to teach in the college as per the requirement of the NCTE.
It is common practice that most of the private colleges employ less number of faculty members or appoint non qualified persons on teaching positions on paltry salaries and enroll fictitious faculty members to meet the objective of NCTE. For many teachers this preposition is beneficial as by becoming ghost faculty they earn an additional income.
By linking the Aadhar number the NCTE plans to end the prevalent practice of ghost faculty. The President of Association of self financed institutes of Uttarakhand, Sunil Agarwal told The Pioneer that ghost faculty is a reality. He said that the NCTE should bring in a change in the minimum faculty requirement as private colleges are not able to afford the number of teachers required by it.
The order of NCTE is bound to create problems for the private colleges offering B. Ed degrees already reeling under loss of students’ interest in the degree. In it earlier decisions the NCTE had made Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed.) and not B.Ed. mandatory for being a primary teacher and increased the duration of B.Ed degree from one to two years.