25 per cent teachers don't teach

A damning UNESCO report, which states that the Indian education system is mired in corruption, has left the HRD ministry with a red face, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 13, 2007, 11:03:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A damning UNESCO report, which states that the Indian education system is mired in corruption and teachers are the biggest players in it, has left the HRD ministry with a red face. The ministry is expected to reply to the charges levelled in the report in Parliament on Monday.

The recently released study on corruption in education, by UNESCO's International Institute of Educational Planning, says that teacher absenteeism in India is among the highest in the world. While the global average of teacher absenteeism is about 20 per cent, in India it is 25 per cent. Only Uganda has a higher rate than India.

While in Bihar, two of every five teachers were reported absent, the figure in UP was reported to be one in every three.

Teacher absenteeism is a huge drainer on resources too. It results in the wastage of 22.5 per cent of education funds in India, the study says.

Absence of well-established criteria for recruiting teachers, no uniform policy on promotion, remuneration and deployment are some of the reasons for teacher absenteeism, the study says.

Teachers may not go to schools, but they are heavily into private tutoring. "Private tuitions do not complement learning at school and lead to corruption," it says.

Then there's the problem of cheating. "In Indian universities, cheating is now well-established," the report said. "The fee for manipulating entrance tests ranges from Rs 3,000 to Rs 8 lakh for popular programmes like computer science, medicine, engineering," the report said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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