The moratorium on the private colleges for starting Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed) courses could trigger large-scale migration of students from the State, claimed the President of Self Financed institutes of Uttarakhand, Sunil Agarwal while addressing newsmen here on Sunday. He said that the recent judgment of Uttarakhand High Court (HC) in which it cancelled the appointment process on 1200 posts of primary teachers and asked the Government to initiate a fresh process by including D.El.Ed qualified candidates has reinforced the National Council of Teacher Education’s (NCTE) stand that D.El.Ed should be the basic qualification for a primary teacher. Agarwal added that since Uttarakhand have very few colleges offering this course, large number of students would be forced to migrate to the states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana where large number of private institutes offers them. It is worth mentioning here that the State Government had in past given an undertaking to NCTE that it is not allowing private institutions to offer D.El.Ed courses as it has sufficient infrastructure to run these courses in its District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs). The education department conducted an entrance examination for 650 seats in 13 DIETs in the year 2014. These candidates are at present in II and last year of their course. Agarwal claimed that at present only DIET Karanprayag has got necessary clearance from NCTE and application of DIET, Roorkee, Almora, Dehradun and Uttarakashi is rejected. He said that UP have over 1000 private institutes which offer D.El.Ed course while the number of such institutes in Haryana is about 500. The President of ASFIU claimed that most of these institutes do not hold regular classes and the candidates passing out from them actually know nothing. “It would be unfortunate if the candidates doing courses from these institutes are able to get posts of primary teachers in state,’’ he said.
There are more than 100 private Colleges in the state of Uttarakhand offering Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) course and at a time when the interest of students for a B.Ed. degree is waning, many of these colleges are planning to start D.El.Ed course which is now mandatory for a job of primary teachers. Their hopes rests on fact that more than 57000 candidates had applied for the entrance examination for 650 odd posts conducted by the state education department in the year 2014 which clearly shows the interest of the student for this course.