Even after three years of implementation of the Right toEducation (RTE) Act, less than 20 percent schools across the country are RTEcompliant. The RTE Act, which was implemented in April 2010, specified a timeframe of three years for improving school’s infrastructure and hiring teachers.The deadline expires on March 31, 2013. But more than 80 percent schools stilldo not have enough classrooms, toilets, access to drinking water, play groundsand teachers.
Appointment of teachers and their placement remains achallenge in many states. There is a shortage of over 7 lakh teachers acrossthe country. Bihar alone has to recruit more than 2 lakh teachers. InJharkhand, the situation is alarming as it has not conducted the TeacherEligibility Test (TET) in the last one year. The state has to recruit around45,000 teachers.
Many states have recruited teachers in the last three yearsbut most of them are not sufficiently qualified. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh havehuge backlog of untrained teachers.
The RTE Act has set up norms for teacher-pupil ratio inschools, which have no place for a single-teacher school, irrespective of thenumber of students in the school. The primary schools must have at least 2 to 3teachers going by the Act.
But more than 5,000 single-teacher schools are stilloperating in Orissa. In Assam, where 28,000 teachers have to be recruited, morethan 2000 single teacher schools operate. West Bengal has to open more than4000 upper primary schools.
Surveys by the fact finding teams of the RTE division of theNational Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), which is entrustedwith the responsibility of monitoring the implementation of the Act, showsmajor infrastructural gaps in the primary schools across many states. DhirJhingran, national coordinator, right to education, NCPCR says theinfrastructure would be in place only by the end of March 2014.
in association with Governance Now
