Faced with an acute shortage of teachers in the schools, the Haryana Government has decided to undertake process of rationalisation of distribution of teaching posts across the schools in the State.
The State Government aims to complete the rationalization process of the posts by March 2018 to ensure smooth running of next academic session in the schools.
The move comes amid mounting criticism over declining academic standards in Haryana’s schools and the teachers being assigned various non-teaching activities.
At present, schools in Haryana are grappling with severe shortage of teachers. There is a shortage of more than 22,000 teachers in the government schools. This includes around 15,000 Post Graduate Teachers and 7,000 Trained Graduate Teachers among other categories, as per government’s statistics.
For rationalization of teaching posts, the Haryana Education Department has sought information from all principals of schools regarding class wise and subject wise student enrolment as on September 30, 2017 in the state.A communiqué in this regard has been sent by Education Department to all district education officers and all principals of schools in Haryana.
The government’s official communiqué while expressing concern over shortage of teachers in the schools, stated, “At present, many teachers are posted at stations where they either have no workload or less workload than the prescribed norms. At the same time, there are schools where teachers are not available for students.
While this improper placement of teachers is blunting teaching skills of the teachers, it is also preparing ground for poor results of the Education Department.”
“The rationalization would pave way for provision for deployment of teachers as per workload calculated on the basis of subject wise students’ enrolment in schools. The class wise and subject wise information of student enrolment as on September 30, 2017 should be submitted for rationalization process,” stated the letter. The DEOs and principals have been directed to upload complete students information on Management Information System (MIS) portal by first week of December.
Any delay in providing any information would in turn invite a strict and serious view by the Chief Minister’s office, the letter further stated.Recently, Haryana Government had decided to re-engage about 5000 retired teachers to meet demand of teachers in the schools.
The State Government had also decided that all teachers would be assigned work in their respective domains up to the prescribed teaching periods. While it was directed that no teacher would be given work beyond prescribed periods, a teacher of higher qualification were asked to teach the lower classes, if required.
Notably, the Manohar Lal Khattar led Haryana Government has remained under fire from the opposition for pursuing the RSS agenda in education instead of improving the declining academic standards during its tenure.