Bhopal: Even as we celebrate Teacher’s Day, 31,000 posts of teachers in government schools in the state are lying vacant. And this figure is a conservative estimate as it is based on the number of vacancies shown by the department. The number would be much higher if one goes by the guidelines regarding the teacher: school ratio. Directorate of Public Instruction has proposed recruitments to fill up the vacant posts but by when it will happen is anybody’s guess.
There are a large number of schools with no teachers at all. In others, one teacher is teaching up to five grades. Then, there are English teachers who are teaching science and Hindi teachers teaching geography. And that is probably why, students of Class 5 cannot read even basic Hindi text properly and neither can they perform basic mathematical operations like addition and subtraction.
The government might be shouting from the rooftops that it is committed to ‘Education for All’ but its words hardly match its deeds. There are at least 3,000 schools in MP on the verge of closure for want of students. School teachers were last recruited in 2012-13 through an exam conducted by Vyapam (now PEB).
Commissioner, school education, Neeraj Dubey admitted that around 31,000 posts in primary, middle and high and higher secondary schools are vacant. Around 4,000 posts of lab assistants and sports teachers are also vacant. He added in a recent exercise, the department found that 16,000 teachers were surplus. They would be posted against the vacant posts.
