Haryana govt makes policy for ‘optimum use’ of teachers

IN A MOVE TO DEAL WITH SHORTAGE OF OVER 17,000 TGT AND PGT STAFF, GOVT WILL GIVE ‘INTERDOMAIN DUTIES

CHANDIGARH: Haryana government school teachers ‘qualified’ to teach subjects other than their present post will also get ‘inter-domain duties’, in a move to deal with the shortage of over 17,000 trained graduate teachers (TGT) and post graduate teachers (PGT).

Across Haryana, there are around 8,000 independent primary schools, 2,380 middle, 1,316 high and 1,911 senior secondary schools. Around 25 lakh students study in these governmentrun schools from primary to Class 12 where over 90,000 teachers are posted.

At least 5,000 posts of the TGTS in the high schools and 12,688 posts of the PGTS are vacant. As per the official records, 15% posts of the TGTS and 35% posts of the PGTS are unfilled.

While issuing directions under its ‘maximum utilisation of teaching staff’ policy, floated last week, the education department also stated that large number of schools have “artificial scarcity.” “It is this artificial scarcity that needed immediate attention. The whole issue of work allocation has been revisited,” said Virender Singh, joint secretary, school education.

He said it has been decided that, as far as possible, teachers will be assigned work in their respective domains up to the prescribed teaching periods.

“However, if a teacher of a particular domain is not available then there will be no bar on assigning the work of such deficient domain to a teacher of a different surplus domain provided that such a teacher has work below the prescribed periods and is qualified,” reads the department’s order to principals, pointing out that no teacher will be given work beyond the approved classes/periods a teacher has to attend.

The education department has said that objective of this move is to “utilise the expertise of available human resource” and due to certain practices of work allocation, teachers are not being given inter-domain duties.

“The result is that despite having qualified, confident and committed teachers, we fail to assign teaching work to them thanks to artificial restrictions. A primary school teacher even if qualified to teach classes at elementary or secondary level, is seldom given higher domain classes. Likewise, a TGT is rarely taken to senior secondary levels,” Singh said.

Already, the state government has launched a policy to overcome shortage of teachers by re-engaging retired teachers.

Another factor that has pushed the education department to conceive out of box solutions to tackle the shortage is that almost 35% students failed in Class 12 and 50% students failed in Class 10 board exams in Haryana which is attributed to the shortage of teachers.

As many as 30 government schools in Haryana witnessed 0% results in the state board exams that were conducted in March this year.