RMC’s ‘Teach for Raipur’ to counter teachers’ shortage

Raipur Municipal Corporation (RMC) has figured out an innovative idea to deal with the issue of teachers’ shortage and guarantee quality education to children studying in corporation’s-run 13 schools by ensuring active participation of well-educated public under ‘Teach for Raipur’ campaign.

With the participation of educated-citizens as volunteer teacher, RMC will be ensuring remedial as well as gap filling classes in 13 schools operation under the corporation, said RMC Commissioner Rajat Bansal, hoping that the move is going to be bring fruitful results.

Most probably, the classes will start from July this year and from next year, we will be starting proper gap filling classes, informed Commissioner Bansal.

“While undertaking inspection of RMC’s schools and interacting with teachers, shortage of teaching staff came to fore, which largely impact quality of education. Immediately, after countering the issue, gap analysis was carried out and this provided a figure of around 51 teachers (lacking in these schools),” said Commissioner Bansal.

He further pointed that process of hiring teachers is very lengthy as several bodies of government get involved in the task but we cannot sit like this so we decided to involve volunteers. After getting the figure of teachers shortage, a search was launched to find out how this problem is being dealt across the country and came to know about ‘Teach for India’ initiative.

Taking cue for ‘Teach for India’, RMC under Raipur Smart City Limited (RSCL) has conceptualized ‘Teach for Raipur’ programme and Azim Premji Foundation is working with us to make the initiative success, said Commissioner Bansal.

As of now, around 200 people have approached to become volunteer teacher, informed Bansal.

He further explained that when a volunteer approached us their enthusiasm is very high but their regularity is a big issue. It may be possible that people quit after participating in one or two classes so it would take some time to target and identify those volunteers who will continue with us for long in interest of students. Currently, we are listing out volunteers for the task and then they will be subjected to a week-long training session to be carried out by Azim Premji Foundation.

Initially, we are not starting gap-filling classes, currently remedial classes (of 1 hour time, the student get after the class from 8 am to 2 pm) and these classes would be more like interaction, mentioned the Commissioner.