Teachers' appointment

The BJP-led coalition government of Sarbananda Sonowal deserves a huge applause for having accomplished an amazing task of appointing 29,710 teachers in one go on Friday. While as many as 16,494 teachers were appointed by virtue of provincialization of their institutions, the remaining 13,217 teachers were given appointment letters because of their merit. With this appointment, shortage of teachers in the educational institutions would be addressed to a great extent. The provincialization of institutions, especially the erstwhile junior colleges, was long overdue. While the process was initiated about 10 years ago, the then education minister had grossly neglected the matter, leading to such a situation where a sizable number of teachers in fact 'retired' after waiting in vain to see their institutions and jobs being provincialized. Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma should get full marks for having finally making the process a reality. Even the previous education minister in the Sonowal government had miserably failed to address the issue, which resulted in such delay that many teachers had already attained superannuation without getting any benefit for no fault of theirs. Running the Education department requires a lot of acumen, which unfortunately most education ministers of the state in the past several decades did not possess.

That exactly was why problems of provincialization, regularization of posts, clean selection process of teachers etc had heavily suffered. Coupled with the inefficiency of education ministers was the rampant corruption in the Education department, with unscrupulous officers in Kahilipara fleecing poor teachers through all possible ways. Appointment of teachers in Assam had for long remained out and out a corrupt process, filthy with nepotism, favouritism and bribery. This in turn had led to 'selection' and appointment of persons most of whom were grossly inefficient, mostly having poor academic record, horrible in terms of communication skills, and unworthy of drawing respect and reverence from students. The final outcome was that generations of students – be it at various levels of schools or in colleges – have been pushed into an uncertain future by way of making them misfit for any kind of quality and productive work. Even regular teachers of institutions already provincialized had to allegedly pay huge sums as bribes in the name of transfers and postings of choice to a section of unscrupulous officers and clerks in the Education department.

With the 29710 newly-appointed teachers, the present government has, in the last five years appointed and/or regularized jobs of over 71,000 teachers, which is definitely a huge achievement. Education Minister Sarma has rightly said that while the government has resolved many pending issues regarding appointment of teachers, the Education department will now be able to concentrate more on quality education, the need of the hour. What however is still left is to identify all those teachers serving in different colleges across the state who had obtained fake PhD degrees from fake universities and in many cases also fake first-class marks from fake and doubtful institutions from outside the region. The Education Minister has a list of about 150 college teachers whose PhD degrees are either fake or misleading. There are a number of private universities without recognition and fake universities that offer PhD degrees without the candidates having to submit any research works (papers). Such universities offer doctorate degrees to candidates within a year by charging a high amount of money. College teachers with such fake degrees from fraud universities should be immediately sacked in the greater interest of the students. There is probably also the need to systematically identify and weed out those college teachers who do not possess a uniformly good academic track record, had somehow managed to scrape through the degree course in Assam and then obtained first-class marks from some universities in other states which are notorious for awarding marks above 60 per cent in lieu of money. This is probably the last task before Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma before the notification for the Assam Legislative Assembly election is issued.