Today India is celebrating Teachers Day in commemoration of educationist and India’s first Vice President, Dr S Radhakrishnan. The occasion is even more special for some students of J&K. Here’s why:
- Jammu and Kashmir has 1733 government primary schools each being run by single teacher. Naturally, the students should be even more indebted to their teachers, without whom, they’d miss a lot.
- The single teacher schools exist even after the department merged over 2000 schools mostly of primary level under the process of rationalization three years ago.
- According to unified district information of school education (UDISE) data, there are 13175 government primary schools in the state. The single teacher primary schools form 13 per cent of the total primary schools.
- Officials of the department have assured that, “The state will rationalize teacher deployment in primary and upper primary schools, so that there is no single teacher school and all schools have PTR as per norms under the RTE Act, 2009”.
Read also: In J&K, most complaints are made against these Govt. Departments
- Besides single teachers schools, around 1100 primary schools and 900 upper primary schools have adverse teacher-pupil ratio in J&K state. Also, around 2100 schools are without subject specific teachers.
- Also, 20.45 percent posts subject specific teachers and 17 percent post of headmasters are vacant in the government secondary schools.
- The school education department has witnessed a decrease in net enrolment ratio (NET) at elementary level from 63.01 percent in 2016-17 to 61.70 percent in 2017-18.
