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Question Of Answers
By INDIA TODAY Special Correspondent Subhash Mishra.

A history teacher takes economics classes. A sanskrit teacher evaluates maths papers. Clerks and non-teaching staff chip in too. And one student gets a record 84 out of 70 in maths. That’s wild, but that’s how education, at least at the high school and intermediate level, can be described in Uttar Pradesh.

Ask those at the board what is happening and all you’ll get is a what-can-we-do shrug. It’s the result of 50,000 posts lying vacant, they’ll tell you. But why aren’t they being filled? There are no conclusive answers, only an ambiguous silence that is enough to pin the story down.

It’s a telling tale of how callous an establishment can get, and of how 32 lakh students have fallen victim to it. This year’s results sum it all up-the failure rate has gone up to a dismal 70 per cent. The merit list, which was held back for three months following allegations of faulty evaluation, was put up last week only to invite more charges. Furious students have even challenged its validity in court.

“A 70 per cent failure is a huge wastage of not only money but also the state Government’s efforts to improve educational standards,” admits Amrit Prakash, director and chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Board for High School and Intermediate Education. But he is non-committal about why things have come to such a pass.

Achala Khanna, deputy director of the board, blames it on the Anti-Copying Ordinance. Her logic: when the ordinance was implemented for the first time in 1992 by the Kalyan Singh government, the percentage of passes nosedived to a record 14 per cent, but improved to 25 per cent the next year when Mulayam Singh Yadav repealed the “draconian” law. It even touched 45 per cent in 1995 but with the ordinance being implemented again this year, the pass-percentage had fallen to 30 per cent.

The Rot Runs Deeper
While that clearly lends itself to debate, what cannot be denied is that the trial-and-error policies of the Government have had an adverse impact. For the past two years for instance, the state Government has been toying with the syllabus of high-school students to pattern it on the lines of the CBSE. One attempt has been to club history, geography, civics and economics under social science without bringing about a corresponding change in faculty. The result is that teachers are clueless about the subjects they teach, a fact that showed up during evaluation.

“Most students who failed this time performed poorly in social science,” says Prakash. It was the same story with English, science and maths. In maths, chapters like computing, taxation and banking were introduced without acquiring the requisite staff. “We have launched a refresher course at the divisional level to update teachers,” says Banwari Lal Sharma, member of the state executive committee of the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh, admitting that the syllabus should not have been changed without preparing the teachers.

But the Government doesn’t seem to be drawing any lessons. When gross irregularities were detected in the evaluation of copy, experimentation, not corrective action, was again on top of the mind. The best way to beat errors in evaluation, the Government felt, was to introduce objective-type question papers from next year.

If erring teachers have managed to get away scot-free, it is not without reason. The teaching community weilds immense political clout in the state, with almost all political parties choc-a-bloc with former teachers. Nearly a dozen ministers in the Ram Prakash Gupta Government were previously teachers. Before that too, the governments headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati had several members of the teaching community. “If we initiate action against a single teacher, they start putting political pressure,” says a senior official of the board on the condition of anonymity.

IT'S NO BIG DEAL
Carelessness in the evaluation of an examination copy does not attract a heavy penalty. The maximum punishment is that the teacher is barred from evaluating copies in the future. Most of the time teachers get away with a light fine-the Rs 2 they get for evaluating a copy is deducted from the total remuneration. In any case, action is initiated only if the mistake is detected. “There should be strict action against a teacher who commits a mistake while evaluating a copy,” says a board official. “Even a minor mistake on the part of a teacher may mar the career of a student.”

Predictably, teachers blame the board for the mess. Speaking to India Today, Panchanan Rai, MLC, says: “The board officials are hand-in-glove with unqualified teachers who get evaluation work by greasing their palms.” Om Prakash Sharma, president of the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shikshak Sangh and MLC, cites the example of a Sanskrit teacher in SKP Inter College in Azamgarh who was caught red-handed checking maths copies. Similarly, says Sharma, hundreds of persons who were not even teachers were found checking copies in Muzaffarnagar. The two leaders say they have filed a complaint and raised the matter in the state council but no action has been taken.

Sharma and Rai also blame the Government for creating a situation that would lead to the privatisation of education in the state. “Why keep more than 50,000 posts of teachers in about 8,000 schools and colleges vacant for years? It is a ploy to defame government-aided schools and make parents send their wards to private schools,” says Sharma. Also, the ideal teacher-student ratio is 1: 25-30. But the teaching shops in Uttar Pradesh have one teacher for 120-130 students. Asked why the Government was not recruiting more teachers, all Nepal Singh, minister for intermediate eduction, said was, “We are collecting details in schools and colleges and will fill up the posts that have been lying vacant for years.” The way things are, it appears that it will be a long, long time before that can happen.

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