HYDERABAD: Badi Bata programme, touted as a game changer for government and local schools, witnessed 3.2 lakh fresh enrolments across the State this academic year.
While this has given the government a reason to thump its chest and proclaim a change in the fate of state-run schools, the fact remains that despite increasing enrolment in the last few years, little has been done to complement it with teacher recruitment.
As many as 4,587 government schools across the State are being run by a single teacher and over 29,000 teacher posts (in primary, upper primary, secondary and high) in State-run schools are lying vacant.
Chava Ravi, general secretary, Telangana State United Teachers Federation (TSUTF) agreed that Badi Bata has given a major push to enrolment in the State.
“Parents have reposed their faith in the government and now its time for the government to restore the faith which has to be done through recruitment of teachers and by providing amenities in these schools,” he said and added that the first step in this regard would be allocating postings to 8.792 candidates selected by the Teacher Recruitment Test (TRT) conducted in 2017.
In the last five years, not a single teacher has been recruited in any of the 28,000 State-run schools. Of these, around 5,000 subject teacher posts are lying vacant in high schools.
The situation in government primary schools is no better. “For each of the five classes (1-5) there are 22 subjects with seven periods daily but there are only two teachers on an average per school. Which means at any given point only two classes will be engaged and students in other classes would be sitting idle,” Nagati Narayana, city-based educationist, said.
In addition, nearly 1,000 headmasters and 550 mandal education officer (MEO) posts are also vacant. Teachers associations have been demanding that these should be filled through promotion.
In an attempt to plug in the teacher crunch in the State-run schools, this year again 16,400 Vidya Volunteers were recruited on the day of the commencement of the new academic session.