Jharkhand government requires one more year to complete the ‘Training of Untrained Teachers’ Project covering an intake of 15,967 teachers in the state approved by National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) since April 2011.
A Proposal regarding this request was sent to NCTE Headquarters at New Delhi last month, informed the officials of Jharkhand Education Project Council (JEPC) on Monday. “Since it is difficult to train thousands of para-teachers together for a period of two years in centres of National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), we divided the seats in two batches. Around 8100 teachers were enrolled in the first batch of 2012-14 session. However, none were enrolled in the 2013-15 session. So, NIOS wants to continue the second batch in 2014-16 session. For this, we need the permission of NCTE as the course was aimed to finish by 2015,” Pramod Kumar Sinha, Specialist Officer of JEPC pointed out.
The Annual Report 2012-13 released by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) mentions that the initiative was taken up as an intensive drive for ‘training of untrained teachers’ to meet the Right to Education (RTE) deadlines applicable for in-service untrained teachers through distance mode.
Explaining the actual reason behind this request, Sinha said, “The admission for the second batch was delayed by NIOS. So, we have no other alternative besides waiting for the permission of NCTE on our recent proposal. Our state lacks adequate NIOS centres. In such circumstances, it was not possible to train 15967 para-teachers in the same batch.” Meanwhile, when the NCTE Chairperson Professor Santosh Panda was contacted in New Delhi for this purpose, an officer said, “As far as I remember we have not yet received any such proposal. Can you please mail or post us a copy of this proposal. Extending the duration of this programme will be something unique.”