Nagpur: Hundreds of teachers from zilla parishad and rural private-aided schools missed out on important training session on Tuesday due to election duty in Nagpur district for gat gram panchayat polls.
The almost weeklong training, being broadcast both online and on free DTH, is about the new curriculum introduced in state till Std VIII. Principals’ association and MLC Nago Ganar slammed the education department for ‘improper planning’.
Ganar said, “Teachers will miss Wednesday’s training session as well because that’s the poll date. Today, they had to report for the pre-preparation exercise. This entire mess is the education department’s doing because they planned the training session during this time. Election dates are known months in advance and education officials could have easily planned accordingly.”
Local education department defended themselves saying they did not have much choice in the dates. Chintamani Vanjari, education officer (primary), said, “We basically implement whatever orders come from above.”
Senior academicians say that pulling out teachers from classrooms affects working of schools drastically. Zafar Khan, president of Urdu School Headmasters Association, said, “There’s a school in Kamptee from where 15 teachers were called for duty and that threw their entire administration into chaos. When classrooms don’t have teachers, it becomes very difficult to handle the children. And considering that the training sessions are also going, we are facing a big problem in handling staff duties.” Khan is also founder-president of a private aided school principals association.
Ganar believes the problem lies in the government’s attitude towards teachers. “Teachers are assumed to be disposable commodity and that’s why a training session is ignored and they are thrown into the unrelated job of being poll agents. In fact, there’s a central government list that mentions which people should be picked first for election duty and teachers are at number 22. But since teachers are easy target, they are probably the first to be picked up for poll duty,” said Ganar.
