Mumbai : The government is planning to bring in legislation to keep tab on private coaching classes, education minister Vinod Tawde told Legislative Assembly here on Wednesday while replying to a calling attention notice over the issue.
The minister also presented the report of the committee appointed to look into the weight of the school bags.
“Government has no control over private coaching classes. Earlier, a proposal to regulate coaching classes had come before the legislature but it did not take shape of a law. Now the law and judiciary department has given its nod for enactment of such a law and the government will take opinion from Advocate General too in order to make the legislation full proof,” Tawde said while speaking on the notice given by Sardar Tara Singh (BJP).
While participating in the debate, leader of opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil said the business of coaching classes has become very profitable given the fact about full page advertisements in newspapers regularly. Prithviraj Chavan (Congress) said coaching classes should be debarred from publicising their profession like lawyers and doctors.
“There is a need to regulate the coaching classes as many people are duped under the pretext of coaching. The government would also check whether it is possible to stop the coaching classes from putting up advertisements,” Tawde added.
Meanwhile, Tawde also tabled the report of the government committee to look into the matter of the weight of the school bags and make them lighter in the assembly.
The committee headed by the Director Education (Primary) has suggested that the weight of the school bags should not be more than one tenth of the average weight of the students.
The committee has also prepared a chart that suggests that ideally the school bags should not weigh more than 1.8kg to 3.4 kg between the first to the eighth standards. While doing so the committee has taken into consideration the weight of books, notebooks and other essentials like tiffin box. The committee also observed that the schools bags of students in cities and those going in non government schools are heavier than those in rural and the government schools.
The committee has also recommended that the schools need to ask the students to carry educational material according to the subjects to be taught on a particular day, any school day should not have periods of more than 3-4 subjects, schools should encourage having joint periods of allied subjects like science etc., they should discourage students to use notebooks with more than 100 pages, the school should have a library like provision for students to keep some of their books in school (like the drawing or the sketch book).
However, the opposition has criticised the government saying that the government has not fixed the responsibility for implementation of the scheme.
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Jr college teachers protest against govt
Mumbai: Mumbai Junior College Teachers’ Union (MJCTU) on Wednesday started four-stage protest against the State government for their 24 demands including scrapping the ‘Shikshak Sevak’ scheme and promotion in the minority schools on the basis of merit and service records. Four-stage protest started on Wednesday morning with morchas staged at all district collectors’ office across the state. In the second stage, all junior college teachers will wear black badges from July 24, in the third stage they will call a jail bharo agitation on July 28. If these protests fail, then they have plans to go on hunger strike from August 1, 2015. MJCTU’s demands include salary grants for IT teachers, old pension scheme for all teachers, junior colleges should be given independent status and teachers should not be declared surplus till the workload becomes zero.
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