RTI reveals BMC schools struggling with excess teachers….Stuti Shukla & Dipti Sonawala
City Anchor – Additional municipal commissioner (education) attributes this to low admissions in vernacular medium schools
City Anchor – Additional municipal commissioner (education) attributes this to low admissions in vernacular medium schools
As if the problem of students’ dropout in civic-run schools was not enough, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) education department is now grappling with the problem of surplus teachers.
In a reply to an Right to Information (RTI) query of a social activist, the department revealed it has 2,287 extra teachers. Activist Anil Galgali claimed this is imposing a financial burden on the civic body.
“The civic agency has been following the teacher-student ratio of 1:40 in big municipal schools like English, Hindi, Marathi and Urdu mediums and a teacher-student ratio of 1:30 in small schools such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Gujarati medium. However, most of the schools have surplus teachers and the BMC is not doing anything to find a solution. The same ratio is recommended under Right to Education Act,” he said.
He said despite this, the BMC has started the recruitment process for teachers at some schools. “Lack of coordination among the officials in the education department has led to this problem. Instead of transferring the surplus teachers to schools with less teachers, they are recruiting new ones. These teachers often have no work and this is leading to unnecessary financial burden on the civic body,” he claimed.
The RTI reply shows that Marathi medium schools have the highest number of surplus teachers. For 1,02,214 students in Marathi medium schools, 2,555 teachers are needed but they have 4,261 teachers.
On the contrary, English medium BMC schools have a dearth of teachers. There are 29,808 students in these schools and while the required number of teachers is 745, they have only 534.
A principal of a BMC school in Chembur said, “Some of these teachers were transferred from schools that have been shut down. Currently, these teachers are asked to do administrative work.”
Additional Municipal Commissioner (Education) Mohan Adtani said admissions to vernacular medium schools have been low for the past few years, resulting in surplus teachers. “We maintain a ratio of one teacher to a maximum of 50 students, but there is no lower limit to the number of students a teacher can cater to at a time. Marathi medium schools have many teachers and not many students and we are utilising their services under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. For mediums like Tamil, Kannada and Gujarati, the number of students have been falling rapidly but we cannot shut these schools as it is the BMC’s duty to run them,” Adtani added.