Acute shortage of teachers plagues government schools in NK

DHARWAD: Even as the Congress-JD(S) coalition government contemplates introducing English as a medium of instruction in 1,000 government primary schools in the state from the coming academic year, schools of North Karnataka in general and north west zone in particular are in bad shape.
Chief minister H D Kumaraswamy appears determined to go ahead with his plan to introduce English as a medium of instruction when he said at the 84th Akhila Bharat Kannada Sahitya Sammelana in Dharwad last week the decision had been taken after considering several factors.

He also clarified that Kannada won’t be neglected and all efforts are being made to strengthen Kannada-medium schools.

Kumaraswamy’s assertion came when many dignitaries, including Sammelana president Chandrashekhar Kambar and former president Chandrashekhar Patil strongly criticised the decision.

While leaders and academicians continue to have differing views on the issue, schools and children continue to languish amid poor quality of teaching and shortage of teachers in North Karnataka districts.

The problem of shortage of qualified teachers is not confined to government schools alone. Aided private schools also face this problem as the government has failed give its sanction to fill vacancies.

The North West zone of the education department covering nine educational districts of Mumbai-Karnataka region -- Bagalkot, Belagavi, Chikkodi, Dharwad, Haveri, Gadag, Sirsi, Karwar and Vijaypura — has 10,976 government primary and 1,125 government high schools.

As per the office of the additional commissioner of public instruction, NW zone, the total number of sanctioned posts of teachers in primary schools is 55,911 and 7487 have been vacant for several years. Similarly, the total number of sanctioned posts of teachers in high schools is 10,175 and 1,191 are vacant.

Education department officials blame teachers for poor performance of students in SSLC examinations and just ask teachers to conduct a series of preparatory examinations. Teachers rue the fact that they don’t get sufficient time to complete the syllabus satisfactorily within the stipulated time as they are often deployed on non-teaching assignments.

Officers at the local level have no clue when vacancies will be filled. “Our job is to pass on instructions received from the top,” said a senior officer.