Right now, 3 million government school teachers are fanning out countrywide to begin enumeration work for the massive 16th India Census 2027. Earlier this year, teachers were deployed to conduct the Systematic Intensive Revision (SIR) to revise electoral rolls. In India, there’s routine deployment of school teachers for non-teaching tasks such as census enumeration, election duty, cattle census, tree counting, and for sundry government schemes and surveys. The latest deployment of teachers — including some from private schools — for the India Census 2027, which is expected to continue until end September, has belatedly provoked a debate on the linkage between children’s poor learning outcomes and deployment of teachers for out-of-classroom tasks.

According to a 2019 study conducted by the Delhi-based National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), government school teachers spent only 19 percent of their time actually teaching, with 42.6 percent of their time taken up by non-teaching activities such as election duty, government surveys, and school administrative work including monitoring mid-day meal implementation, maintaining student enrolment data, etc. Unsurprisingly, 66 percent of teachers identified non-teaching duties as the biggest hurdle to teaching.

Yet, perhaps the greatest casualty of teachers being pulled out of classrooms for non-teaching duties is poor student learning outcomes. According to the Annual Status of Education Report 2024, published by the highly respected, independent Pratham Education Foundation, which field-tested 649,491 rural students in the 3-16 age group, 51 percent of class V children can’t read class II texts and 69 percent of class V pupils can’t solve simple division sums.

Yet, despite overwhelming evidence of children’s learning outcomes plunging because teachers are overburdened with non-teaching tasks, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009, permits the government to deploy teachers for decadal census, election duty and disaster relief programmes. Several court verdicts have also ruled in favour of teachers being deployed for the Census exercise, describing it “a national duty”.

The solution to freeing up teachers from non-teaching work to enable them to focus on their core job of teaching, is neither novel nor complex. A unified field statistics cadre, trained and maintained by the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, deployable for census, agricultural, and health surveys, would break government dependency on teachers for out-of-classroom work. The US federal government, for instance, employs 4,000 full-time staff for its census bureau which swells with the induction of university students during decennial counts. For election duty, the Election Commission can also draw personnel from other government departments.

At a time when India faces a foundational learning crisis, continued diversion of government school teachers for out-of-classroom duties is self-defeating. Teachers present in classrooms and teaching is integral to improving children’s learning outcomes and restoring the credibility and effectiveness of the public education system.