Srinagar: Government schools in Jammu and Kashmir are facing an acute shortage of subject specific teachers even as the administration recruited over two thousand teachers in recent months.
As per the minutes of the Project Approval Board (PAB) meeting of Samagra Shiksha for 2019-20 academic session for Jammu and Kashmir held by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) last year, 90 percent secondary schools in the erstwhile J&K state were without four subject teachers. Also, there were 70 percent upper primary schools where three subject teachers are not available.
It said that 3952 teacher posts were lying vacant at Government Secondary schools and recommended the posts be filled on priority.
It asked the J&K government to fill on priority 418 posts of headmasters and principals lying vacant in Government Secondary schools and 102 in Government Higher Secondary Schools, respectively.
“State may focus either on teachers’ rationalisation to meet requirements of the subject teachers or to recruit fresh subject teachers on priority,” read the minutes of the meeting.
As per the MHRD, the retention rate of students at secondary level was 56 percent.
The MHRD had in the same meeting pulled up the government officials on the lack of proper training to over two thousand teachers at the government schools.
The ministry said that there were 2061 untrained teachers in government secondary schools, “who do not meet the requisite professional qualifications”.
It also asked the J&K School Education Department to prepare an action plan to conduct the requisite training.
In 2017, the union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had asked the untrained teachers across India to register themselves on the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), an online portal for the compulsory training.
The MHRD had warned that the untrained teachers failing to admit themselves for the training programme would lose their job by March 2019.
Following the MHRD directive, the School Education Department had in December 2017 enrolled 20,000 untrained teachers with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for B Ed programme.
The MHRD had also suggested that there was an “urgent need to have a renewed focus on universal enrolment/ attendance and completion of elementary education” saying that the J&K government had not conducted/ updated survey of Out of School Children since 2016-17.

Irshad Khan