The Hindu : Karnataka News : Students of five classes in one classroom

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 05, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

Students of five classes in one classroom

Rishikesh Bahadur Desai

BIDAR: A.C. Marakale lives in Bidar. He is an assistant master in the government lower primary school in Bhavani Nagar Tanda in Aurad taluk. He rides his motorcycle to the Tanda as there are no buses to that place.

The tanda (a settlement of Lambani community) that borders Maharashtra also suffers from other infrastructure handicaps such as lack of roads, drains, quality electricity, and a primary health centre.

He signs the muster and handles other administrative work. He supervises the distribution of mid-day meal that is prepared by the assistant cook.

He speaks to the 55 students of classes one to five, made to sit in one classroom. The other classroom is under construction. Students in the lower classes need to be taught. The others can study for themselves, he says.

The school has two “sanctioned” posts of teachers. But the head master has not joined duty. Education Department officials have told the parents that he has been deputed to another school. However, there has not been a replacement.

The quality of teaching in this school is not hard to guess.

“We have repeatedly urged the Government to post another teacher but in vain,” said Jagannath Chengdi, a farm labourer whose child is in the school.

A worse case

Worse is the case with the Government High School in Vanamarapalli village which has just one teacher for 150 students. The village is on Bidar-Nanded Road, about 5 km from Aurad town.

The Kannada-medium school in this Marathi-dominated village has classes one to eight. The Government has sanctioned seven teachers apart from the head master.

Only one teacher has joined. The others did not, says Baburao Biradar, school development and monitoring committee president. “The vacancies exist from June this year. We approached the Bidar Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer demanding teachers. He issued orders to some teachers to join the school. But despite that, they have not turned up,” says Mr. Biradar. The only teacher in the school, who did not want to be named, said he travels every day to Aurad. His routine involves supervising the mid-day meal cooking and serving, besides taking lessons for high school students.

“I make all the students sit in one class as I can not manage otherwise,” he said. “The noise is the most difficult to manage,” he added. The teacher is fortunate in that the Marathi-medium school that functions on the same premises has enough teachers. They share some of his paper work.

“We are Marathi speaking. But we want to send our children to Kannada schools as it would be easy for them to get jobs,” says Mr. Biradar. Children get bored and make noise because there are not enough teachers, he says. “The Government should realise that the lack of teachers is affecting an entire generation. It demoralises any parent who wants to send his child to school. If the situation does not change soon, we will launch an agitation,” Mr Biradar said.

When contacted, zilla panchayat Education and Health Standing Committee chairman Rajshekar Naga Murthy said that the panchayat would ensure that all posts are filled. “There were 80 single-teacher schools before the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was implemented. After that all of them have been converted into two-teacher schools. We will fill vacancies, if any. We will take action against errant teachers,” Mr. Murthy said.

Deputy Director of Public Instruction M. Devanand said the Government would post 193 more teachers to schools with staff shortage.

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