Gujarat finally moves to ease teachers’ workload

Ahmedabad: Gujarat govt is set to systematically relieve schoolteachers from administrative and non-teaching assignments starting the 2026-27 academic year, with officials citing the direct impact on the quality of education as the driving concern.Sources said that the govt has taken cognizance of excessive non-teaching workloads placing significant strain on core teaching duties, with a measurable effect on classroom outcomes. To address this, academic audits will be introduced to track mandatory instructional hours — 800 for primary teachers and 1,000 for secondary teachers — creating, for the first time, a formal accountability mechanism around actual teaching time, the sources added.
"Govt has decided to gradually unburden teachers of the administrative and non-academic duties allotted to them from academic year 2026-27. We have identified 123 non-academic, non-education-related works in which teachers are engaged on and off. Our aim is to free them from as many non-teaching jobs as possible at the earliest," a senior education department official said."A gap-analysis exercise has been undertaken to map the non-academic activities where teachers are engaged, so as to identify the key work areas and also identify other departments from where human resources can be mobilised," the official added.Teacher associations say non-academic assignments collectively consume more than 100 days in a year. The Ahmedabad District Primary Teachers' Association has documented 56 such duties — from vaccine surveys and voter list revision to gram sabha work, Aadhaar enrolment, sports events, cleanliness drives and nutrition campaigns. These duties eat into roughly 110 academic days, or an entire semester. That is half a school year in which a teacher is, in effect, not teaching.The issue reached a fever pitch earlier this month when teachers were ordered to conduct stray dog surveys in their localities. In 2025, four teachers deployed as booth level officers during the Special Intensive Revision of voter lists died of cardiac arrests, with teachers' associations pointing to the weight of workload. Some teachers also faced departmental proceedings over administrative delays during the same exercise. An analysis by senior state bureaucrats in Dec had revealed that there are 120-plus administrative functions that were piled onto teachers in govt and govt-aided schools.For women teachers, who make up nearly half the state's teaching workforce, the non-academic burden carries an additional dimension. "Some people shut their doors on us. Some take our phone numbers and call us late at night. On top of our household responsibilities, this becomes unbearable," one woman teacher said, adding that many colleagues ask male relatives to accompany them on field visits for their own safety. Several teachers say they feel "helpless and guilty" about not being able to focus on students, with one admitting: "I feel like a clerk most of the time."Ahmedabad Shikshak Mandal president Manoj Patel said associations have approached senior state officials, including the chief secretary and the education minister, at least 10 times. "We have been requesting that teachers be relieved of additional responsibilities so that they can focus on teaching. The non-academic duties consume more than 100 days of their teaching time. The Right to Education Act strictly prohibits assigning teachers non-educational duties, except for census, disaster relief and elections," he said.Legal experts note that while Section 27 of the RTE Act restricts such assignments, a broadly worded clause in Section 24 on "other prescribed duties" has historically been used to justify a wide range of non-teaching work. Several states and courts have, in recent years, invoked Section 27 to withdraw teachers from such duties.