E-Paper
Transfer drive begins to fix teacher surplus-shortage in UP schools
For the 2025-26 academic session, the council has released a list on its portal outlining vacancies and surplus teachers to facilitate intra-district transfers and adjustments.
The Basic Education Council of Uttar Pradesh has reported a surplus of assistant teachers in 16,475 government-run primary (classes 1 to 5) schools, while 39,536 schools have more principals than required.
Similarly, according to officials from the state Basic Education Department, 4,145 upper primary schools (classes 6 to 8) have a surplus of assistant teachers, while 3,638 schools have more principals than necessary.
For the 2025-26 academic session, the council has released a list on its portal outlining vacancies and surplus teachers to facilitate intra-district transfers and adjustments. As per the list, 29,935 government primary schools are in need of assistant teachers, while 14,245 schools require principals, they added.
Likewise, 19,268 upper primary schools require assistant teachers, and 3,602 schools are in need of headmasters.
According to Surendra Kumar Tiwari, secretary of UP Basic Education Council, teachers can select a minimum of one and a maximum of 25 surplus schools as their preferred choices for intra-district transfers. The process began with the issuing of the relevant order on May 23. He added that headmasters of primary schools and assistant teachers of upper primary schools can apply interchangeably for the vacancies listed for their respective posts.
After submitting their applications online, teachers are required to submit a hard copy of the application to the concerned Basic Shiksha Adhikari (BSA) office. This will be followed by online verification and data locking at the BSA level. Subsequently, a transfer list will be generated using software developed by NIC-Lucknow. The entire process is expected to be completed by June 30.
However, due to a two-day delay in releasing the list of surplus and required schools, the revised timeline has not yet been issued.
Of these, around 50 teachers retired within three days of the appointment orders being issued, while others declined to assume their new roles as they were posted to distant schools, officials acknowledged.
Director of Secondary Education Mahendra Dev submitted a proposal to the government on May 9 to revise the appointments, but no action has been taken so far. According to the report sent to the state government, two male teachers and five female teachers declined the promotion altogether, while only 77 teachers have assumed their new roles.
A total of 156 teachers (29 male and 127 female) have submitted applications requesting a revision of their postings. The departmental selection committee for these promotions had convened on December 11, 2024, at the Director’s camp office in Lucknow. However, the promotion orders were issued three months later, on March 12, 2025. After submitting their location preferences online on March 25–26, the final posting orders were released on March 28.
The affected teachers claim that had the promotion list been released in a timely manner (within a month of the departmental selection committee), this situation might have been avoided. Furthermore, they allege that vacancy details of nearby schools were deliberately withheld, leaving them with no choice but to opt for distant postings.
The Secondary Education Department has come under criticism from teachers for posting even disabled teachers to schools located as far as 800 kilometers from their current residences, without any apparent consideration for the challenges they might face in reaching such remote locations.
