Rajsamand: Holding placards and raising slogans, some 1,300 schoolgirls marched through the streets of their villages, protesting the lack of teachers in their schools in Rajasthan.
“We want to study, but there is no one to teach,” they sang in a chorus as they walked through three villages in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, some 270 kilometres from Jaipur and NDTV followed.
There are four teachers for 308 girls in a secondary school in the village called Dever, just off the National Highway 8. The school needs at least 16 more teachers but cannot find candidates for the vacant posts.
In the neighbouring village of Barar, in a school that goes up all the way up to class 12, there are three teachers for some 300 students. This school needs 27 more teachers.
Further ahead, in the biggest school so far – the higher secondary girls’ school in Bhim town – there are 700 students and only four teachers. The school has not even had a principal in eight years.
Neha, a class eight student from the school in Dever, knows that an education means freedom from household chores and most importantly a way out of underage marriages.
“If there are no teachers, how can we pass exams? If we fail once, our parents say ‘stay at home’ and then eventually they get us married off early,” she says.
Last year, from these three schools, less than half the girls managed to pass class 10 and class 12 exams. The others just dropped out.
After the girls’ strike in these three schools yesterday, the government deputed some temporary teachers in these schools but they are only a stopgap measure, say the students.
According to the education department’s own data, more than 40 percent government schools across Rajasthan are being run by less than three teachers.
“I have inherited a crumbling structure in the education department. But I hope the 50 percent vacancies will be brought down to 20 before I leave,” Rajasthan’s Education Minister Vasudev Devnani says.
(This appeared in NDTV on July 24, 2015)