RANCHI: Hundreds of parents along with their children and concerned citizens took out a rally and staged a dharna at the Block office at Manika in Latehar against the rampant shortage of teachers in schools.
As per government data, almost half of the government primary schools under Manika Block have single teachers in them. The parents also read out a letter and appealed to Chief Minister Hemant Soren to ensure at least two teachers in each of the primary schools as single-teacher schools are illegal under the Right to Education Act.
According to parents, the situation is getting worse year after year as teachers are retiring without any new appointments being made to fill up the vacant posts. The state government keeps promising to appoint teachers, but it has yet to get its act together, they claimed.
Interestingly, no appointment of primary teachers has been made in Jharkhand schools since 2016. The latest attempt to appoint 26000 Assistant teachers was stayed by the Jharkhand High Courts after Cluster Resource Persons (CRPs) and Block Resource Persons (BRPs) filed a petition demanding a reserved share of teacher appointments.
The seriousness of the matter could be gauged by the fact that several girls of Kasturba Residential Girls School at Chainpur in Palamu and Mandar in Ranchi recently had fled from their schools to register complaint about the shortage of teachers and other mismanagement before the Deputy Commissioner.
Girls in Mandar even staged a blockade on NH-33 for around one-and-a-half hours on August 10 demanding more teachers in their school.
Meanwhile, school education in Manika is in the doldrums as single-teacher schools have almost 50 students on average, and some have more than 100. Even in schools with more than one teacher, the pupil-teacher ratio is rarely below 30, as prescribed under the Right to Education Act.
According to a parent,t Dhaneswar Singh from Jamuna, “This government is making fools of us; unless we come together we won’t be able to change the situation.”
Social activist James Herenj explained that schooling gets little attention from politicians because it is a children’s issue and children have no voice. Many parents were worried about how their children would manage in the future without education, he said.
“Typically, all the children are herded into a single classroom. Quite often, teaching is reduced to copying exercises, if there is any teaching at all. Single teachers are often busy with record-keeping and other non-teaching work,” said Herenz.
Shortage of school teachers is a huge problem across Jharkhand; as per the Unified District Information System (UDIS) for Education, Jharkhand tops among 22 states in the country where nearly 22 per cent of the total students enrolled in government schools, have been studying in single-teacher schools. Moreover, almost one-third of all government primary schools have a single teacher, according to official UDISE data.
