District Institutes of Education and Training - Teacher Education

District Institutes of Education and Training: A Comparative Study in Three Indian States
officials and the DIET that were absent while they were in different sectors:
Udaipur DIET hoped that would improve the deputation and attendance of
teachers at training programmes. In 2000, the Directorate of Elementary
Education directed all District Education Officers to stress teacher training,
lending an official weight to the DIET’s activities that had previously been
missing. Even with such a directive, DIETs will still need to work to improve their
profile and the quality of training programmes to convince District Education
Officers of their relevance.
Gujarat had already developed its own DIET cadre which provided a stability and
professional growth path for DIET staff that was absent in both the other States
– although recruitment of senior staff had yet to be resolved. It had also orientated
all Education Department officials to academic activities during which the GCERT
led discussions of the role of the DIET, how it should be integrated into the
Education Department, and the nature of support it requires from officials.
Reporting on the favourable reception of the first such training, GCERT officials
planned to continue this innovation through future programmes. The relevance of
this newly instituted practice is underlined in the following discussion of what can
happen when this is not done.
6.3 The DIET in the District
6.3.1 Relations with the local Education Department
Within a District, the overseeing officer of elementary education is the District
Education Officer or equivalent. The District Education Office, working through
its officers at Block level and the inspectors, has historically taken a primarily
administrative, rather than academic, role with foregrounded concerns in teacher
placement, school building and upkeep, and so on (Dyer, 2000). The lack of
institutional support for teacher development at the District level was part of the
rationale for the establishment of the DIET (e.g. NCTE 1998a). In effect
therefore the DIET is taking on a set of responsibilities which, although nominally
under the ambit of the Education Department, were operationally more or less
excluded by other concerns. In principle, the Education Department and the DIET
have different, but complementary, roles to play in the improvement of educational
quality in the District. Achieving this synergy of focus on quality improvements in
practice was achieved to different extents across the sites.
Until systemic decentralisation sweeps across from the DPEP, educational
administration remains governed by the longstanding civil service culture of
hierarchies and orders (Kumar 1991). The DIET operates from a position of
weakness compared with the regular administrative structures, since it does not
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