Aspiring would-be school teachers who passed the state government’s Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) in 2011 have become infamous in Lucknow, the admin capital of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 200 million), India’s most populous, under-governed and arguably, most educationally backward state. They have regularly been protesting on the city’s roads, blocking traffic and indulging in anti-social behaviour.
Recently they resorted to relay hunger strikes to force the Samajwadi Party government of the state to implement the Allahabad high court’s decision of November 20 which ruled that selection of assistant teachers (newly recruited teachers) in primary as well as junior high schools of the state should be on the basis of scores obtained in the TET held on November 13, 2011. The court had directed that the exercise of selecting assistant teachers should be completed by March 31, 2014. In light of the court’s judgement, TET qualified teachers are demanding the start of the counseling procedure for appointment of 72,825 teachers statewide.
Comments Ganesh Shankar, president of the UP TET Sangharsh Morcha: “The decision of the court has been in our favour. But the government doesn’t want to make the appointments. It doesn’t care about the fate of nearly 3 lakh TET qualified teachers who passed the exam almost three years ago.”
On its part the Samajwadi Party which was elected to power in March 2012 — six months after the exam was written — is reluctant to make the appointments (it has appealed the Allahabad high court’s judgement in the Supreme Court) because of allegations of widespread cheating and fraud during the TET conducted on November 13, 2011 during the rule of the Mayawati-led BSP government in the state. As early as November 26, 2011, charges were made that bribes were collected from thousands of aspirant teachers who wrote TET 2011. Sanjay Mohan, then director of Uttar Pradesh Board of Secondary Education which conducted the exam, was arrested on February 7, 2012 on the charge of extorting bribes from aspiring teachers and a sum of Rs.4.67 lakh was seized from him.
Shortly after the Samajwadi Party government was sworn in March 2012, the state’s youthful chief minister Akhilesh Yadav appointed a committee to investigate the charges related to TET 2011. Inevitably the teacher-aspirants who did well in the test protested appointment of the comm-ittee. The committee headed by Jawed Usmani, chief secretary of the state, confirmed “anomalies” in the exam and recommended that a merit list of teachers should be prepared on the basis of marks obtained in the class X, class XII, graduation exams and TET.
“This is very unfair. Rules for any examination are made at the beginning. How can they alter the rules in the middle of the game? This will lead to the disqualification of so many TET qualifiers,” says Shankar.
But even though the Allahabad high court has decreed that the UP govern-ment appoints 72,825 assistant teachers solely on the basis of their performance in TET 2011, the high pass percentage (48.3) of aspirant teachers who wrote the exam, gives cause for suspicion. In the neighbouring state of Bihar only 2.8 percent who wrote TET 2012 passed, in Tamil Nadu a mere 0.37 percent passed and in Andhra Pradesh only 0.61 cleared TET 2012.
In the circumstances the Allahabad high court’s November 20 judgement directing the state to make assistant teacher appointments on the basis of TET 2011 is quite clearly hasty, and needs to be reviewed/appealed. But the state government’s messy compromise directive of April 10, 2012 asking for a merit list to be prepared on the basis of several exams including the tainted TET 2011 is also an unsatisfactory via media.
Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, president and chief operating officer, City Montessori School, Lucknow, suggests a re-exam for the appointment of the 72,825 teachers in the state. “There is no harm in a re-exam. Those who are competent will pass the test again; those who were incompetent will not be able to clear it fraudulently this time. What is paramount is the interest of students who need to be protected from unskilled and incompetent teachers,” says Kingdon.
Quite obviously the huge number of teachers who cleared TET 2011 through fair or foul means — probably the latter — don’t agree.
Apoorv Srivastava (Lucknow)