12,000 new teachers to be hired

MANESH SHRESTHA

KATHMANDU, Oct 24 - The government plans to hire 12,000 new teachers in the country's community schools, as government-run schools are known, this fiscal year, but this seems to be an ad-hoc solution to the shortfall of teachers. Although this may sound like good news, there is ...

"Of the 12,000 teachers being hired this fiscal year, 4,000 will be at the primary level," said Hari Lamasal, deputy director in-charge of planning at the Department of Education (DoE).

But there is no strict criteria to be followed for their recruitment, unlike for permanent teacher positions.

As has been the case with new governments hiring teachers over the past four years, these teachers will have temporary positions and they are known as 'relief' teachers. They will be hired locally according to the needs of individual schools while the centre will pay their salaries. With this new recruitment, the total number of such teachers will reach around 39,000.

There are at present about 27,000 relief teachers, including some 18,000 at the primary level, about 5,600 at the lower secondary level and 2,900 at the secondary level, said Yogendra Baral, an official in-charge of teacher mobilisation at DoE.

The government has not created teacher vacancies for more than a decade. According to a government official, in 1996, the government wanted to find out the needs of schools and transfer teachers accordingly before creating vacancies and assigning them to schools across the country. But transferring teachers to schools is a political issue since teachers often have political patronage and choose which schools they want to work in. Government bureaucrats cannot tackle this problem without political backing.

"No government has been strong enough to create new positions and sort out the problem," says Bidyanath Koirala, the educationist.

Even with the new recruitment, there will still be a shortfall of about 35,000 teachers, according to government estimates.

"The main reason for this is that there simply is not enough money," says Koirala.

The concept of relief teachers was introduced during the Maoist insurgency when the number of students in community schools in the western Tarai increased because of displacement by the insurgency, according to Lamsal.

Although they were initially given less salary than permanent teachers, Lamsal says that the salaries of relief teachers are now at par with the permanent ones.

According to latest statistics at the Department of Education, there are about 130,000 teachers working in nearly 26,000 community schools across the country. These teachers teach nearly 5.8 million students, of which nearly four million are in grades one to five.

Of these teachers only about 90,000 are permanent employees, although there is a government quota for 107,835 permanent positions.

Once again teachers have not been hired because of political uncertainty as well as political interventions, say officials.

Teachers are recruited not because students need them but because political parties have to recruit their supporters as teachers, says Koirala.

According to Bishnu Devkota of the National Teacher Service Commission, the body responsible for appointing and promoting permanent teachers, the last time applications were called for permanent teacher positions was in 2004, and before that in 1995.

Besides permanent teachers and 'relief' teachers, community schools also hire teachers with their own resources to 'make do'.

"When the state does not make political decisions, the bureaucrats have to make do and that is what they are doing with the relief teachers," says Koirala.

These hirings may provide temporary relief but will become a political issue when the government has to hire permanent teachers for the long term. In the past temporary teachers have called strikes demanding they be made permanent and students from education faculties at the universities have also demanded that permanent teachers be recruited through open competition.

"With a shortage of teachers in community schools and political intervention in their appointments, the overall quality in school education will remain elusive," says Koirala.

More than 80 percent of Nepali children still go to community schools, according to DoE statistics, despite the growth of private schools in the towns and cities.