Shortage of 1.2 million teachers: Sibal
The human resources development minister Kapil Sibal on Friday said that there is a shortage of 1.2 million teachers in India and states must speed up the recruitment process to bridge the gap.
“We have a shortage of 1.2 million teachers. In some states there is an enormous backlog from last several years. In Bihar about 100,696 posts are vacant,” Mr Sibal told the Rajya Sabha during Question Hour. Bihar’s mention raised protests from the Opposition benches who said that it was wrong to project the figures of a particular state which are a result of decades of neglect.
Mr Sibal, however, maintained that there is a need to speed up the recruitment process. “In some states, we have found that all deployment (of teachers) is done in one school while there are no teachers in others. We need to re deploy teachers so that there is equal distribution of teachers,” he said. He also voiced concern over the lack of enough quality institutions to train teachers. “The problem is that not enough students are going for Bachelor of Education course, and we also lack quality training institutions, which is adding to the problem,” he said.
Mr Sibal said there was a need to make the profession of teaching attractive by giving incentives like insurance, housing and healthcare facilities. “Across the world, the best minds opt for teaching profession but this is not happening in India. So we need to give them more incentives,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mr Sibal informed Rajya Sabha that the government has sanctioned 24,521 National Means-cum-Merit scholarships in 2009-10 which is a sharp comdown as compared to 54,564 in the previous year. Replying to supplementaries during Question Hour, Mr Sibal said states are not sending adequate number of eligible students for the monthly scholarship of Rs 500. The National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship scheme initially envisaged creation of a corpus of Rs 3,000 core over a four-year period. The interest earned was to be utilised for payment of scholarships every year in the secondary and higher secondary stage, he said.
But there was a drastic fall in interest rate — from 9 per cent to 5 per cent — after the first tranche of corpus was created, he said. “Since the yield from the corpus at the new interest rate would not have been adequate for the purpose of the scheme, it was decided in May to wind up the existing corpus of Rs 1,000 crores and to make annual budget provision to meet each year’s requirement,” he said. A budget provision of Rs 90.50 crores has been made for 2010-11 to fund the scholarship and related expenditure.
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