INDIA'S EDUCATION ( A CULTURAL GENOCIDE)

Chapter 9 The hated ones

Let us now talk about a very basic problem which exists in every school in the country, I am talking about teachers. Yes, I know that all of them are not bad and they also have certain rules to follow but my point is there are some jobs where you absolutely cannot have bad apples. Imagine an airline that says that "most" of our pilots like to land but some will most likely crash because we cannot monitor everyone.

There are very few teachers in India who can be considered good valuable educators and the number of students is rising steadily. This is causing a lack of good quality education even in private schools that take a lot of tuition fees. Another problem is that teachers are not well trained in most schools. Even if there is just one bad teacher, he or she will probably make the student hate the subject instead of making the student more interested in the subject matter.

The best way to analyze the efficiency of a teacher is to ask his or her students, however, I cannot claim anything without conducting a survey but you can always just ask any student how they feel about their teachers. If we were to believe the statistics available online then, India is dealing with a scenario of significant teacher vacancies, which are to the tune of almost 60-70 percent in some states. There are over one lakh single-teacher schools present across the country.

On the other hand, there are 17,000-odd Teacher Education Institutes (TEIs) that are responsible for preparing teachers through programs such as the Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.), and Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed). Taking their sanctioned intake into account, at full operation, these TEIs could generate over 19 lakh freshly trained teachers every year as against the estimated annual requirement of 3 lakh teachers.

To put things in perspective, currently, there are about 94 lakh teachers across all schools in India. Every year, the teacher education system could therefore be producing one-fifth of the total number of school teachers.

Apart from this glaring quantitative aspect, let us consider the quality aspect. Not only are these TEIs generating a surplus supply of teachers, but they are also producing poor-quality teachers. Besides it being reflected in the dismal state of learning across schools, the pass percentage in central teacher eligibility tests that stipulate eligibility for appointments as teachers has not exceeded 25 percent in recent years. This begs a pertinent question — how did we get here?

The answers lie in the inadequacies of planning, regulation, policy, and organizational structures. The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) and its four regional committees (north, south, east, and west), established by statute, are responsible for teacher education in India. However, the Act assigns disproportionate power to the regional committees which grant program affiliation while the Council has been rendered toothless.

Perverted incentives, widespread corruption, and commercialization have resulted in a massive proliferation of sub-standard TEIs. The decade between 2004 and 2014 saw a five-fold increase in the number of programs recognized by these regional committees. About 90 percent of these institutes are privately owned and a mind-boggling majority of them are standalone institutes, running single programs with as few as 50 students.

While most of these TEIs are financially unviable, some function out of tiny rooms with duplicate addresses, and a few could even be selling degrees at a fixed price. These institutes function in isolation from the rest of the higher education system, and there is no system to assess and accredit them. Consequently, there is no systemic sieve to ensure the entry of only motivated and meritorious individuals into the teacher education space.

A more granular look reveals disparities across regions and programs offered. Almost one-third of the TEIs are concentrated in Uttar Pradesh. Ghazipur, a district in UP with a population of around one lakh, has a whopping 300 TEIs. Approximately half of the total TEIs are in the northern region with Rajasthan having the second-largest number of institutes.