With the past appointment of school teachers done through panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) and urban local bodies since 2006 landing in court due to controversies surrounding them, Bihar’s education department is now working on a mechanism to ensure centralized monitoring of all future recruitments.
Education minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary said the objective behind decentralizing the recruitment process was to vest more responsibility in the democratically elected PRIs and urban local bodies, but due to complaints about irregularities the matters landed in court.
“Now, the effort is to monitor the recruitment process online through a system located centrally in Patna without diluting the role of PRIs and urban local bodies a wee bit. This is only to usher in greater transparency and accountability. We have to recruit another 1.25 lakh teachers and as soon as we get the nod of the court, we will start it,” he said.
The minister said that there was no point making recruitment in one year and then dealing with litigations for the next 10 years. “We are developing an online process so that the candidates could have a fair idea of every stage – right from the time they apply to the making of the merit list and issue of appointment letters by the recruiting agencies at the level of PRIs and urban local bodies,” he said.
The move is significant as the Bihar’s Vigilance Investigation Bureau (VIB), probing the suspected appointment of teachers on forged document on the orders of the Patna High Court since 2015, is still unable to complete the exercise due to education department’s inability to make available nearly one lakh missing folders, as cooperation from PRIs, many of which underwent change of guard in the last 15 years, was found lacking.
With the court expressing displeasure over the delay, the government recently came up with an alternative mechanism and fixed the accountability on teachers to get their documents verified by uploading them afresh. The teachers have to upload the certificate for minimum eligibility required for their recruitment, along with their marksheets submitted along with the application and the recruitment letter on a web portal designed for the purpose.
In the fresh recruitment of around 94,000 primary teachers, the department has, learning from the past, decided to tread cautiously. All the documents will be verified before issuing appointment letters. For the new exercise also, all documents will have to be uploaded on the portal.
The minister said the government was also ready to go ahead with the new recruitment process for teachers fully enforcing the reservation roster formula. The court had earlier stopped the recruitment process following allegations that reservation roster was not being followed. The hearing in the case is due.
“The government will guarantee adherence to the reservation roster in letter and spirit. The government wants to give benefits to all the categories. We have to hire around 91,000 teachers in elementary schools and 30,000-plus in secondary and higher schools. As soon as we get the go-ahead from the court, the process will start. We will assure court there will be no deviation from the roster,” he said.
