primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
allocate work to teachers without the permission of the department but no one follows that
GO. The DMs are kings; they treat teachers as their servants.
Now people in the villages are watching to see if the teacher comes regularly or on time but
this kind of consciousness does not exist when it comes to learning. Even this change has
come since 1998 or so. The other side is that from around 1998 teachers are expected to go
door to door to give polio drops to children who do not come to the centre on Pulse Polio
day. The community feels that the teacher is wandering. As a result the respect for the teacher
has gone down.
(Group discussion with teachers from Jaipur and Tonk districts, February 2008).
A recent study points out that ‘In Rajasthan, teachers’ transfers were regarded as
ways of “obliging” teachers who were close to powerful people, or were doled out as
rewards (or punishment) for services rendered such as assistance in political
campaigns. In some cases transfers were simply rent-seeking operations. The
teachers had to pay a sum of money to get a preferred place of posting. (…) Both the
major political parties had rewarded their supporters and punished the supporters of
their opponents on assuming power…’ (Sharma and Ramachandran forthcoming).
Both teachers and authorities thus utilise all available channels to manipulate the
system for their own benefit, generating an enormous problem not only in Rajasthan
but country-wide. As the following short narrative written by a teacher in the Kargil
district of Jammu and Kashmir shows, ‘teacher attachment’ derails educational
planning and sends a clear signal to teachers to ‘network’ with the powerful. In
Kargil, teachers have found their own ways of influencing the educational and
district administration to get themselves shifted out of locations that they do not find
convenient. Therefore many schools in urban and peri-urban areas of Kargil are
flooded with teachers, while there is a constant refrain that rural/distant schools face
teacher shortages. In many urban schools, ‘attached’ teachers do not have much
work to do. In fact, they need not even attend school every day, for there are too
many teachers waiting to teach children! They then attend school on rotation.
Box 2.2: When teachers get ‘attached’ in Kargil
It is said that our district is behind others when it comes to education. There are many factors
responsible for this. One of these factors is the ‘defective’ teacher transfer policy of our
district. Teacher transfers, for instance, take place over the whole year in our district! The
approach to transfer is neither systematic nor transparent. While the issue of teacher transfer
demands attention, I will focus on the equally problematic phenomenon of ‘Teacher
Attachment’ in this article.
‘Attachment’ refers to a temporary form of transfer… and it generally works for those who do
not want to work in a particular area/school—they are then ‘attached’ to a school in a more
convenient location, while they continue to keep drawing their salary from the other school…
In this cesspool of transfer and attachment, we are compromising our future and are instead
choosing to continue our teaching under a blanket of darkness. The community/society
cannot do anything but watch this ‘tamasha’ in helplessness.
Teachers who have political clout and influence are transferred to the urban and semi-urban
areas of Kargil town. They invariably retire from such schools. Further, no lady teacher is
ready to serve in schools that are more than 6-8 kms from the block headquarters. They seek
roadside schools. But 80% of our population lives in rural areas, and that is where most of
our government schools are. Only males are sent to these rural areas, even though the
percentage of female teachers working in the district is more than 25%. This tends to affect
15