Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)

Rural primary children: severe teacher shortage

The public education system in the southern state of Karnataka (pop.69 million), whose admin capital Bengaluru is the nation’s ICT (information communication technologies) epicentre and most recently voted India’s #1 hub for start-ups and unicorns, is in bad shape. The state’s 49,000 government schools, 430 government colleges and 41 state universities are debilitated by severe teacher/faculty shortages.

On December 19, Madhu Bangarappa, school education minister of the incumbent Congress party government, informed the legislative assembly that 59,772 teachers’ posts are vacant in the state’s 49,679 government primary-secondary schools. A few days earlier on December 15, a report of the Comptroller Auditor General of India titled ‘Functioning of Primary Educational Institutions in Karnataka for 2017-2022’ highlighted that the number of single-teacher schools in the state had risen sharply from 4,652 to 6,616 between 2017-22, and that 19,799 public schools have no playgrounds and 6,861 lack library facilities.

Likewise, in the state’s government-run higher education institutions (HEIs), there’s a huge shortage of teaching and non-teaching staff — 2,723 teaching and 6,328 non-teaching posts are vacant in the state’s 41 public varsities. Moreover, 37,069 teaching posts in colleges managed by the medical education department of the education ministry are vacant.

Informed monitors of the state’s economy attribute these education institution vacancies to a teacher recruitment freeze prompted by the state government’s precarious financial condition. Since the Congress party was voted to power in May 2023 and began implementing its five pre-election “guarantees” — 200 units of free power for every applicant household, 10 kg rice per person in below poverty line (BPL) households, free-of-charge travel for women in government buses, Rs.2,000 per month for women heads of family and Rs.3,000 for unemployed graduates — the state’s finances have gone from bad to worse. In 2024-25, the state’s budget allocated Rs.53,674 crore (out of state government’s total budget of Rs.3.71 lakh crore) to these schemes — 47 percent higher than the revised estimates for 2023-24. To fund these poll promises, the state has doubled its borrowings from the Reserve Bank of India from Rs.44,548 crore in 2022-23 to Rs.85,818 crore in 2023-24.

According to Mohandas Pai, Chairman of the Manipal Global Education Group, under the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government, the state’s revenue deficit has ballooned from Rs.4,000 crore in 2023-24 to Rs.27,000 crore in 2024-25. “There’s a Rs.45,000-50,000 crore swing in expenditure. And where has the money gone? It’s gone for freebies. They are borrowing money to give freebies. Why is Siddaramaiah not giving scholarships to young people (instead) to go to college and train them? Karnataka generates 1 million jobs per year. Only about 45-50 percent are filled by locals, the rest by people from other states. Nothing wrong with that… Why can’t you train our own people. He (Siddaramaiah) is not doing that. He is giving freebies,” said Pai in a podcast last month.

Unsurprisingly, with the state government’s revenue being diverted into consumption expenditure, investment in education is on a back burner with an unofficial freeze on recruitment of teachers. To make good the huge vacancy backlog, the education ministry has resorted to hiring ‘guest teachers’. Thus far, 45,000 guest teachers have been appointed at Rs.10,000 per month remuneration cf. Rs.25,000-60,000 payable to permanent teachers. Guest teachers complain that even this meagre amount is not paid regularly. Last September, after guest teachers vigorously protested non-payment of their accrued dues, the state government released Rs.249.41 crore to clear them.

“Full-fledged recruitment of government school teachers has not happened for two years. After the Covid pandemic, recruitment was stalled with the government stating that children had moved to private schools. Now the government’s priority seems to be fulfilling its poll guarantees rather than investing in public education. The fallout of this huge number of teacher vacancies is that students’ learning outcomes have plunged. There’s an urgent need for the state government to conduct a thorough survey of schools to determine teacher vacancies and start a recruitment drive immediately,” says Maya Menon, founder of the Bengaluru-based Teacher Foundation.

Meanwhile children’s learning outcomes are in free fall. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023, published by the highly-respected independent Pratham Education Foundation, which in a departure from past practice surveyed the learning outcomes of youth aged 14-18 in 28 rural districts across 26 states, in Karnataka almost one-third (32 percent) of rural teens aged 14-16 can’t read class II textbooks in their vernacular tongues and 62 percent can’t solve simple math sums. And only 28.5 percent have their own smart phones.

Astonishing statistics for India’s premier ICT hub state.