1.6 lakh teaching posts vacant in govt schools: RTI reply
UP has a sanctioned strength of 759,958 posts in primary, upper primary govt schools
ALLAHABAD: A whopping 1.60 lakh posts of teachers are lying vacant in government-run schools across 75 districts of the state.
This has been conceded by the state government itself in information provided to the Centre while seeking financial aid under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.
The report submitted to the union ministry of human resource development (MHRD) shares that as many as 1,74,726 posts of teachers were vacant in schools of up to class 8 alone till April 2016. Despite recruitment of 15,000 assistant teachers undertaken by the state government to deal with the shortage, around 1.60 lakh posts were still lying vacant in different schools.
These facts have emerged following an application filed by Durgesh Pratap Singh, Right to Information (RTI) activist of Gonda, before the MHRD under the Right to Information Act.
The MHRD reply dated March 17, 2017 also reveals that Uttar Pradesh had a total sanctioned strength of 759,958 posts in primary and upper primary government schools while there were just 585,232 teachers working at the moment.
Alarmingly, 10,187 government-run primary schools and another 4,895 government-run upper primary schools were running in the state with just a single teacher each.
These data was presented before the Project Approval Board of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan held on April 22, 2016 and it was on the basis of this that grants under various heads, including for salary of teachers were approved, an education department official told HT.
He conceded that no new recruitments had taken place following the submission of the data owing to various reasons, including pending litigations filed against different recruitment processes. The data shows the extent to which shortage of teachers affect the governmentrun schools in the Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh at a time when crores were being spent to lift the quality of education in these schools annually.
The RTI query revealed 1,53,307 posts of teachers out of the total 5,32,001 were vacant in government-run primary schools of UP. It also disclosed there were also 1,016 posts of head masters/head mistresses vacant in the state against the sanctioned strength of 66,498 posts in these primary schools.
In government upper primary schools, 5,390 posts of assistant teachers against sanctioned strength of 1,17,240 were vacant even as 15,013 posts of head masters/head mistresses were also vacant against the sanctioned strength of 44,219.
I had filed the RTI application to know the state of affairs in the education sector and the data reveals poor state of education in the state. Despite such a huge number of vacancies, recruitments are not being undertaken DURGESH PRATAP , RTI activist The Uttar Pradesh government needs to immediately undertake recruitment drives to fill up all vacant posts of teachers . This is vital for the students as well as eligible qualified youth desperate for jobs. DILEEP SINGH, general secy, Allahabad div, Jr High School Shikshak Sangh, UP