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February 2015, turned out to be full of shock after the Maharashtra government was done with its annual evaluation test for teachers in government schools.
In a shocking statistical revelation, about only 1% of the 245,000 primary school teachers who appeared for the test and 4.9% of the 142,858 upper primary school teachers passed the test.
“In the wake of Teacher Eligibility Tests [introduced after the Right to Education Act, 2009] and the high proportion of candidates who fail to clear the examination – there are people who argue that subject knowledge is poor among our teachers. They point out that it is the quality of teacher – her/his mastery over subjects, pedagogic skills and aptitude to teach that is perhaps responsible for poor learning” wrote Vimala Ramachandran of the National University for Educational Planning and Administration, an affiliate of the human resource development (HRD) ministry, in a study.
Why such statistics?
Because many people resort to teaching as a last option when it comes to choosing a profession, which explains the number of untrained or inadequately trained teachers.
Less than one in five teachers adequately trained
In an effort to boost the quality of teaching in government schools, the union government in 2011 launched a programme under the universal education programme, or Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, to support states and union territories for annual, in-service teacher training programmes.
There are 4.5 lakh or 0.4 million untrained elementary school teachers, according to Smriti Irani, HRD minister. The central programme has trained only 19.2% of teachers up to 2013-14.
Despite spending Rs 586,085 crore ($94 billion) over the last decade on primary education, India has been unable to arrest the decline in learning. The quality of teaching and teachers, millions of them untrained or under-trained, is now emerging as a key problem.
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