primary school teachers the twists and turns of ... - ERU Consultants

Version 20 Oct 08, edited finalallocate work to teachers without the permission of the department but no one follows thatGO. 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 butthis kind of consciousness does not exist when it comes to learning. Even this change hascome since 1998 or so. The other side is that from around 1998 teachers are expected to godoor to door to give polio drops to children who do not come to the centre on Pulse Polioday. The community feels that the teacher is wandering. As a result the respect for the teacherhas 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 asways of “obliging” teachers who were close to powerful people, or were doled out asrewards (or punishment) for services rendered such as assistance in politicalcampaigns. In some cases transfers were simply rent-seeking operations. Theteachers had to pay a sum of money to get a preferred place of posting. (…) Both themajor political parties had rewarded their supporters and punished the supporters oftheir opponents on assuming power…’ (Sharma and Ramachandran forthcoming).Both teachers and authorities thus utilise all available channels to manipulate thesystem for their own benefit, generating an enormous problem not only in Rajasthanbut country-wide. As the following short narrative written by a teacher in the Kargildistrict of Jammu and Kashmir shows, ‘teacher attachment’ derails educationalplanning and sends a clear signal to teachers to ‘network’ with the powerful. InKargil, teachers have found their own ways of influencing the educational anddistrict administration to get themselves shifted out of locations that they do not findconvenient. Therefore many schools in urban and peri-urban areas of Kargil areflooded with teachers, while there is a constant refrain that rural/distant schools faceteacher shortages. In many urban schools, ‘attached’ teachers do not have muchwork to do. In fact, they need not even attend school every day, for there are toomany teachers waiting to teach children! They then attend school on rotation.Box 2.2: When teachers get ‘attached’ in KargilIt is said that our district is behind others when it comes to education. There are many factorsresponsible for this. One of these factors is the ‘defective’ teacher transfer policy of ourdistrict. Teacher transfers, for instance, take place over the whole year in our district! Theapproach to transfer is neither systematic nor transparent. While the issue of teacher transferdemands attention, I will focus on the equally problematic phenomenon of ‘TeacherAttachment’ in this article.‘Attachment’ refers to a temporary form of transfer… and it generally works for those who donot want to work in a particular area/school—they are then ‘attached’ to a school in a moreconvenient 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 insteadchoosing to continue our teaching under a blanket of darkness. The community/societycannot do anything but watch this ‘tamasha’ in helplessness.Teachers who have political clout and influence are transferred to the urban and semi-urbanareas of Kargil town. They invariably retire from such schools. Further, no lady teacher isready to serve in schools that are more than 6-8 kms from the block headquarters. They seekroadside schools. But 80% of our population lives in rural areas, and that is where most ofour government schools are. Only males are sent to these rural areas, even though thepercentage of female teachers working in the district is more than 25%. This tends to affect15