Government schools face teachers crunch

Gadwal: With just about 12 days left for the government schools to re-open after the summer vacation, the vacancies of teaching faculty in various government schools at primary, upper primary and high school levels is worrying the district school education department in Gadwal district.

According to the district education department statistics, there are about 620 teacher posts vacant in 458 government schools spread across 12 mandals and four urban local bodies in the district.

With the non-availability of teachers for various subjects both at the primary and high school levels the burden on existing teachers is increasing and this is in turn harming the quality of education.

"Jogulamba Gadwal district is already having very low literacy rate and the indices of enrolment, out of school children, child labourers, pass out percentage and availability of adequate facilities in schools etc are also on the lower side, the vacancies of the teacher posts will more hit the quality of education in the district.

It is high time the State Education Department give a special focus on Gadwal and direct the district Education Department and the district administration to take up the appointment of temporary teaching faculty," said Nanda Kishore, a resident of Gadwal district.

As per the Right to Education Act, it is mandatory that the government schools should appoint one teacher to every 20 students. Going by this arithmetic, the Gadwal district must have a total of 12,250 teachers across the district.

Of this, apart from vacancies created due to transfers, retirements and other reasons, the Gadwal district at present is having about 620 vacant teachers posts up till June last year.

But the school education department did not bother to fill these posts and the students are facing tough time due to lack of proper teachers to teach them. However, the School Education Department which has already acknowledged the faculty crunch in the government schools is also taking up initiatives to appoint temporary teachers in the form of Vidya Volunteers.

Last year, the education department had appointed about 800 Vidya Volunteers to cover-up teacher vacancies in the schools temporarily. However this year with more and more teachers retiring and a few more going on transfers, this year there is a proposal of 1,030 posts of Vidya Volunteers to be filled.

However, as per the sources, the district administration has decided to employ about 620 Vidya Volunteers to fill the teachers vacancies in schools where the strength is high, while those schools having low strength will be managed by the existing teachers.

The areas of Gattu, KT Doddi, and Undavalli mandals in Gadwal are the most backward mandals in terms of literacy. The schools in Gattu mandal alone has 170 teacher posts vacant and this time the education department is planning to fill them with Vidya Volunteers.

Anohter mandal KT Doddi is also expected to fill 95 teacher vacancies with temporary Vidya Volunteers. The honorarium given to Vidya Volunteers is about Rs 12,000. However, the experts are of the view that the system of Vidya Volunteers is a temporary solution and it is not going to provide long term solution.

They suggest that if the government fill the vacancies with well trained teachers to improve the quality of education rather than depend on the temporary teachers who are not well trained and experienced and it is ultimately impacting adversely on the students' education.