The Government primary schools of the State are suffering from acute shortage of the teaching staff as more than 7,000 posts of teachers are lying vacant.
This shortage of staff is reflecting in the teaching standards of these schools. The recently released Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) also highlighted the deteriorating quality of education in Government primary schools in rural areas and that the private schools were catching up with the Government schools in terms of new student enrollment.
Uttarakhand has about 30,000 Bachelor of Education (BEd) and Teacher’s Eligibility Test (TET) qualified unemployed candidates who are now on a warpath against the State Government to fill these vacant posts. The cliché is that if the State Government fails to recruit them before March 31 this year then these trained individuals would become ineligible for teaching in primary schools of the State. According to the new Central Government guidelines, only Basic Training Certificate (BTC) trained and TET first-level passed candidates can be appointed to teach in the primary schools. This decision by Human Resources Development (HRD) Ministry made BEd qualified individuals ineligible for appointment in the primary schools.
Some States pleaded stating they did not have required number of BTC qualified candidates for filling thousands of vacant posts of primary teachers, so the HRD Ministry allowed these States (including Uttarakhand) to induct BEd candidates on the condition that the State Governments would give them a short six months special BTC in service training.
The HRD Ministry gave Uttarakhand March 31, 2014 as the last date to induct BEd candidates as primary teachers. Interestingly, the neighbouring State of Uttar Pradesh managed to take this waiver up to March 2016.
The agitating BEd, TET qualified unemployed teachers are demanding that the Government should immediately start the recruitment process otherwise they would lose the chances of job. On Thursday, they gathered at the residence of Education Minister Mantri Prasad Naithani and tried to meet him and began raising slogans on being told that Naithani was not at home. The police arrested them when commotion increased and took them to Suddhowala jail from where they were released in the evening.
President of Unemployed BEd/TET federation, Baldev Singh Bhandari said they would continue their struggle. He accused the State Government of making false promises to them. Bhandari said that the Federation has been agitating since January 4 but the Government has remained apathetic. He said that the federation would now start a hunger strike at the office of Education director.
The Primary Education Director of Uttarakhand RK Kunwar told The Pioneer that the department has sent the issue to the law department to take the legal opinion as during the last recruitment of primary teachers some candidates had gone to the court which delayed the process.