PATNA: As the Bihar government prepares to resume caste survey work in the state following the Patna high court’s verdict, the education department has told district authorities to ensure that teachers are deployed for the survey in a way that schools are not left without any teachers.
“The teachers should be deployed only for caste survey work, and no other administrative work be taken from them. The schools should not be left without teachers,” said additional chief secretary (education) KK Pathak in a letter to all districts.
In a separate order, Bihar’s State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) director Sajjan R has cancelled all ongoing training programmes involving teachers with immediate effect and asked trainees to report to their respective schools to work for completion of the caste survey at the earliest.
Bihar government officials started prepping for the caste survey within hours of the high court verdict and issued the necessary orders.
“As the high court has dismissed all the writ petitions against caste survey, the order putting on hold the exercise in the light of the May 4 court order is withdrawn. Steps be taken to restart the work forthwith,” Bihar government secretary Md Sohail said in an order.
In state capital Patna, district magistrate Chandrashekhar said around 4 lakh families out of 13.69 lakh families were not covered when the process was stopped. “They will now be covered. It is happening smoothly and the families are cooperating,” he said.
Bihar secondary teachers’ association president Shatrughan Prasad Singh said that he has written to chief minister Nitish Kumar about teachers being blamed for the state of education without giving them their due.
“Mid-session, teachers will be deployed for caste survey and after that, there will be festival holidays and election duty. When are they supposed to teach? In 2016, the Supreme Court observed that engaging teachers in non-academic work was against the Constitution. It even objected to the deputation of teachers on non-academic posts. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) also issued a similar order for its schools,” he said.
Singh complained that teachers were routinely engaged in a host of activities such as cattle census, general census, other surveys, election duties, pulse polio campaign, verification of family records, and organising social campaigns despite court orders and the Centre’s directive. The chief minister has often spoken about sparing teachers even from mid-day meal duty, but nothing has changed, he lamented.
Anand Kaushal Singh, primary teachers’ association president, said the move to deploy the teachers for the caste survey in the face of the department’s earlier orders.
“What happens to attendance monitoring? How long will education be sacrificed for politics in Bihar? Was Pathak’s action just for publicity? Why can’t other employees be deployed for caste survey work to spare teachers for teaching? If the educational scenario is so bad, as Pathak underlined, it should be all the more reason for this,” he asked.
“The reality is that the teachers are also expected to teach after completing all the additional work the government wants them to do, without acknowledging them as government servants. Education is optional, as they are hardly left with time and energy,” he added.
