Soon, e-leave for govt teachers in Telangana
HYDERABAD : Government school teachers would soon be required to apply for leaves online. To curb absenteeism and irregularities in maintenance of attendance registers, the Education department has roped in the Centre for Good Governance to come up with an app where government school teachers can apply for leaves.This move is part of the department’s ambitious Integrated School Management System (ISMS).
The CGG has sent the proposal nearly a fortnight ago and plans to roll out the app within six months of the approval. Once implemented, it will impact 1.20 lakh teachers in 25,966 government schools of Telangana.
“The app is a part of the human resource module, one of the 20 modules that we are working on for the education department under the ISMS,” said T Vijay Karan Reddy, CGG director, who reiterated that the ISMS would serve as a single platform where all information pertaining to school, staff and students could be readily obtained. An important aspect of ISMS is that it is structured in a way that apart from monitoring the activities of government schools, the department has integrated a mechanism to keep an eye on private schools as well including the number of students and teachers in all private schools, infrastructure, revenue and expenditure among the others.
Mixed response from teacher community
Government teachers are lauding the intent of the education department, but are sceptical about the outcome. “It is important to understand why the absenteeism is high. Of 540 Mandal Education Officer (MEO) posts, over 500 are vacant. Headmasters are also discharging the MEO duties and there is no monitoring authority. As a first step to arrest absenteeism and improve quality of teaching, the monitoring system has to be worked upon.
Then back it up with apps and biometric attendance,” said Chava Ravi, general secretary, Telangana United Teachers’ Federation. Last month, the education department issued a circular that primary and upper primary school teachers would have to forward the leave application to the headmasters and also the MEO for approval after it found irregularities in attendance and leave applications. The circular resulted in a widespread protest and government was eventually forced to scrap it.