Govt to engage ‘visiting faculty’ for its schools

Ahmedabad: After introducing the system of ‘visiting faculty’ or ‘pravasi shikshak’ for class 10 and class 12, in government schools in 2015, the state government now plans to extend the system across all sections.
The decision was announced by the state education minister Jitu Vaghani on Saturday. Schools are set to go offline from Monday onwards. Right now, government schools face a shortfall of more than 10,000 teachers.The process of recruiting 3,300 teachers is currently on, said Vaghani.
Each of the ‘visiting’ or temporary teachers will be paid a wage of Rs 500 a day and Rs 1,500 for 24 days of service during the month. Vaghani said, “A budget of Rs 10.5 crore has been approved for engaging Pravasi Shikshaks. The new system of visiting faculty for our schools will help us fill the vacancies in our schools.” A senior education department official said that nearly 75% of the teachers in primary schools are women and there are issues of substitutions when there are instances of maternity leaves, transfers and other special needs. “Also a number of teachers are waiting for employment after their TET tests for the last two to four years,” adds the education department official.