5000 guest teachers to be recruited

Following the High Court (HC) order, the State Education Department has started preparation for recruitment of guest teachers in the vacant posts of Lecturers and Lecturer Teachers. More than five thousand posts of LT and Lecturers are at present vacant in the Education Department. It is learnt that the department is planning to recruit these teachers at district level. In the last recruitment drive, these teachers were selected at the block level. Apart from it, the monthly remuneration of these teachers is also likely to be increased from existing Rs 15000 per month. For recruitment, the department would constitute district selection committees. The department sources reveal that the process to appoint new guest teachers would at least twenty days. The services of these teachers would be purely temporary and at the time of appointment they would have to submit an undertaking that the department would have to right to remove them.

The Education Min Arvind Pandey said that he has directed the officials that the process of recruitment of the Guest Teachers should be transparent. He said that the old guest teachers would be given priority in the new selection process.

The recruitment of guest teachers was done first of all in the Harish Rawat Govt when about six thousand such teachers were appointed in different schools in the year 2015. They were appointed for a period of nine months or end of the academic session on purely contractual basis. When their contract was terminated in March 2016 they started a massive agitation which forced the then congress government to reinstate their services. The order was, however, challenged in the court which cancelled their reinstatement. The matter then went to bench of HC which asked the State Government to initiate a proper recruitment process to fill vacant posts of teachers in the Government schools. The court meanwhile granted temporary relief to the guest teachers working on posts of LTs and allowed them to work till March 2018. As per the order of the HC the State Education Department terminated the contract of these teachers in March this year and has now started the process to start a new process of recruitment of guest teachers.