Left out in the cold, once again

These teachers had to be trained to teach not their subject, but how to read and write. The new teachers will have to be trained again, setting us back by almost two to three years.

ATISHI MARLEN, advisor to Delhi education minister

NEWDELHI: Thousands of ad-hoc or guest teachers in Delhi schools have been left out in the cold once again with lieutenant governor Anil Baijal asking the Delhi government to reconsider introducing a bill which was meant to regularise their jobs.

According to Delhi government’s Directorate of Education, guest teachers were hired to fill up vacant posts that have increased due to a backlog in the recruitment process over a decade. They now form almost a third of the total number of teachers in Delhi.

The 1,029 government schools in Delhi, employ over 48,000 teachers, of which over 14,000 are guest teachers and almost 2,000 are on contract, who are engaged under the Centre’s Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan, according to Atishi Marlena, the advisor to education minister Manish Sisodia.

At the Government Girls’ Senior Secondary School in Sonia Vihar, of the 100 teachers, around 78 are guest teachers according to the principal, Rajeshwari Kapri. She said the lone English teacher for their 12th graders is a guest teacher.

These teachers have been at the forefront of many of the government’s initiatives, including the Chunauti Mission, where the students who were not able to read even their own textbooks were taught to read at their own level, and the summer camps, where teachers were supposed to bridge learning deficit for sixth graders who come from MCD schools.

“These teachers had to be trained to teach not their subject, but how to read and write. The new teachers will have to be trained again, setting us back by almost two to three years,” said Marlena.

Though the government had earlier this year hiked their salaries by almost a 100%, these guest teachers are still paid on a daily basis, and regularisation would ensure that they get a fixed monthly salary.

“We do not get holidays or leaves. We lose out on money for weekends, or even if we fall ill,” said an adhoc teacher working at the Government Girls Senior Secondary School (GGSSS) Panama Building. Priyanka Gupta, a History guest teacher at the GGSSS in Sangam Vihar, said job security was a major concern for them.

H Akhtar, the head of Government Boys Secondary School in Sarai Kale Khan, said “running a school without guest teachers would be next to impossible”, as the younger cohort was “more energetic, motivated, and tech savvy”.

Kapri, of the school in Sonia Vihar, though agreed on the value that guest teachers have brought to her institution, but she also contended that the guest teachers should also have to appear for the competitive exams with others. “Others who may have been waiting for years for a government school job, where will they go?” she said.