Dismaying teacher shortage in Indian academia

A rising tide of teacher discontent and disaffection is swelling at a time when an unprecedented teacher shortage is manifesting across the country. Academic institutions are reporting an alarming shortage of faculty. Summiya Yasmeen reports Within a society notorious for wasting valuable human resources, September 5 — Teachers Day — marked by desultory celebrations and mealy-mouthed homage to India’s 5 million beleaguered and under-valued academics, was a day of sombre introspection. Following the daylight murder on national television of Prof. H.S. Sabharwal in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh by militant student activists, teachers in India’s geographically largest state (308,252 sq km) boycotted all Teachers Day celebrations. In Bangalore members of the Federation of University and College Teachers Associations of Karnataka (FUCTAK) presented a list of grievances to the state government on the day. In Lucknow the capital of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (pop. 166 million), government school teachers struck work and clashed with police while protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Simultaneously in Meerut University, following a women students-led demonstration against the vice-chancellor on August 29, all Teachers Day celebrations were cancelled. Perhaps never in the history of post-independence India has the teachers’ community been as dejected and demoralised as it is today. Paradoxically, following the 86th Amendment of the Constitution which makes it mandatory for the State (government) to provide free and compulsory education to all children in the six-14 age group, and national rollout of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (Education for All) programme, never before has teachers’ morale been so critical to national development in this country blessed or cursed — informed opinion is divided — with the world’s largest child population (415 million). Unfortunately the rising tide of teacher discontent and disaffection is swelling at a time when an unprecedented shortage of teachers is manifesting across the country. Suddenly as government and private schools, colleges and universities are confronted with an unprecedented teacher shortage, alarm bells are ringing in Indian academia, even if not in the sleepy warrens of the education ministries in New Delhi and the state capitals. In Karnataka, 23,000 teaching posts in government primary and high schools are vacant; in benighted Bihar, teacher vacancies number 2.3 lakh. The Unesco Institute of Statistics in its report Teachers and Educational Quality: Monitoring Global Needs for 2015 released in June, says that to meet the Millennium Development Goal of providing elementary education to all children by 2015, “India will need the greatest inflow of new teachers in the world — more than 2 million”. It’s an indicator of the depth of the growing teacher shortage slowly overtaking India that the bourgeoning private schools sector, which hitherto attracted a perennial supply of best and brightest teachers, is also experiencing a faculty crunch. According to www.schooljobs.in, India’s pioneer online teacher recruitment portal, 500 vacancies have been notified by private schools during the past three months. Moreover the appointments pages of national newspapers are increasingly attracting teacher recruitment advertisements with one school sometimes advertising for 15-20 teachers. Gone are the days of principals of top…