Last Updated on May 24, 2021 at 11:07 am
Due to shortage of staff, especially the lecturers in Government Higher Secondary Schools is causing a major disruption in conduct of online education during the lockdown period.
There are over 3000 posts of teachers vacant in the School Education Department in J&K. The government is facing difficulty to fulfill the demands of various sections as masters demand promotions, over-aged contractual seek absorption, unemployed youth demand direct recruitment through Public Service Commission to fill these posts.
But the delay of government to fill the posts has been affecting the education of students of government higher secondary schools. According to sources, the School Education department had a total of 3013 vacancies of lecturers in various Higher Secondary Schools till February 1, 2021.
These posts include 321 posts of Education, 268 of Math, 243 English, 239 Urdu, 191 Physics, 188 Political Science, 166 of Economics, 162 of Botany, 162 of EVS, 140 of History, 136 of Chemistry, 95 of Hindi, 87 of Sociology, 56 of Geography, 51 of Commerce, 44 of Persian, 31 of IP/IT, 23 of Computer Sciences, 22 of Philosophy, 22 of Functional English, 19 of Arabic, 17 of Statistics, 17 of Punjabi, 16 of Sanskrit, 14 of Kashmiri, 12 of Geology, 9 of Psychology, 8 of Islamic Studies, 7 of Home Sciences, 157 of Zoology beside others. In the last three months more posts would have fallen vacant and the vacancies would be higher.
Earlier against the vacant posts, the School Education Department had been engaging contractual faculty on academic arrangement basis to overcome the shortage but since last two years, almost all the contractual faculty members have been disengaged, while students needed to cope themselves.
As well as, Human Resource Section (HRM) of the department is deferring the procedure of mass promotions due to some unknown reasons, according to masters working in schools says that department has not conducted a Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) since 2019 despite an order issued during the reign of former Governor SP Malik.
President of All J&K Plus-2 Contractual Forum, Pankaj said that the process of DPC should be stopped permanently. “Earlier also the department had effected 100 percent promotions of Masters against the quota of 50 percent to fill posts through departmental promotions”, On adding he said that over 1600 contractual faculty members had given their golden years to the department but had not been regularized despite a number of SROs as well as rules framed for absorption of contractual employees.
Also he mentioned that most of contractual lecturers who are now disengaged were over age and have no avenues of employment but despite requests to successive dispensations their pleas were not accepted.
