Attention Education Minister

One wonders if Assam’s education minister Siddhartha Bhattacharyya has been reading newspapers or not in the past few days, especially since the HSLC examination results were announced last week. While it has been already pointed out that about 50 schools have drawn a blank in the said examinations, about 250 schools could not achieve even 10 per cent success in the HSLC examination. It was pointed out in this column on Sunday that principals of several prominent schools located in Guwahati have tried to invent poor excuses to justify why a large number of their students had failed to get through life’s most crucial examination. What they have – and also what the education minister too has – not dared to admit that a large number of posts of teachers, principals and headmasters have been lying vacant in hundreds of educational institutions across the state. Look at just a couple of schools in Guwahati. Of the 47 students who had appeared in the Dakhin Guwahati High School, only 19 have passed, with the school’s performance standing just at about 40 per cent pass. Likewise, of 14 students who had appeared from the Barsajai High School, only four could manage to pass. Even in the Dispur Government Higher Secondary School – which grabs headlines when former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh comes every five years to cast his vote – as many as 14 of the 34 candidates have failed. This school is hardly 300 metres from the office of the state education minister and chief minister. There have been reports that several hundred posts of principals, vice-principals, headmasters and other teachers in numerous government higher secondary and high schools have been lying vacant for years. Similarly, a sizeable number of posts – believed to be close to 350 – in the colleges and universities of the state have also been lying vacant for several years at a stretch. That includes the post of Vice-Chancellor of Gauhati University, which is currently being held by a person whose term had expired several months ago. How does the government justify this? How does the government expect educational institutions to complete the syllabus within a fixed time (which again gets disturbed due to bandhs, strikes and blockades called by numerous organisations which generally thrive on donations forcibly collected from corporate, business houses and even petty shopkeepers) so that the students are fit to take the examinations at the end of the term? What the education minister could do is examine every school, every institution, and then hold the departmental officers concerned – and not necessarily headmasters and principals – accountable for the sorry state of affairs. The education minister could also visit some of the schools, without informing his officers, and understand through free and frank discussions with the existing faculty what exactly are the lacunae that need to be addressed.