Total teachers: 5,60,412 Pupil-teacher ratio: 20 Student-classroom ratio: 21 Avg teachers per school: 5.1 As two boys bend over a generator, Dhanraj Nagar, principal of the Government Senior Secondary School in Pipalda, impatiently paces around the dark room. It’s 30 minutes into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s televised Teachers’ Day address and there is no sign of electricity being restored or the generator coming to life. Things had been running smooth till about half an hour ago. The school had borrowed a television and set-top box from an adjoining house and even the generator had been checked the previous day. But minutes before the PM’s speech, it all fell apart. Nagar made repeated calls to the executive engineer in the power department, but to no avail and now, the generator isn’t responding. At 10.30 am, electricity is restored and Nagar and the other teachers swiftly assemble the children in the open playground, facing the TV that’s precariously perched on the boundary wall. “A doctor conducts a surgery and newspaper writes about him the next day, but a teacher produces 10 such doctors but no story is written on him,” says the PM as his audience nods in agreement. Students and teachers of this school, 60 km from the coaching hub of Kota, would know that better than anyone else. On July 20, students from Classes I to XII had locked the school gates and marched up to NH 12, right next to the village, and blocked the highway that leads to Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s home constituency in Jhalrapatan (Jhalawar). They had dispersed only after the district administration assured them that they would get more teachers. Within a week of the protest, the school had got five new teachers, including a principal, up from the existing six teachers. “I heard of the protest only when I reported for duty here. My transfer orders came all of a sudden,” recalls Mohan Lal Mehrotra, the school’s new history teacher, who joined on August 3. With no principal for the past four years, the school’s infrastructure is in a mess — the walls and ceilings are crumbling, the toilets are dirty, animals stray inside in the absence of a proper boundary wall, and when it rains, the playground gets flooded. But over the last one month, there has been some change. “We bought fans, tubelights, dustbins and other things from Kota yesterday,” says Surendra Singh Hada, the mathematics and science teacher who, for the past two years, had been grappling with managerial work all by himself. “There is a lot more to be done. Did you see how the children had to stand out in the sun during Modiji’s address? Just yesterday a sanction for six new classrooms arrived. We will have to change a lot of things here,” says principal Nagar. Even after the merger of the primary and the senior secondary schools in Pipalda last year, the teacher strength has remained poor. Despite the new appointments, there are only 15 teachers against the sanctioned strength of 19 staff members for the entire school. Most of the teachers travel all the way from Kota, making the long bumpy ride on buses or infrequent trains. But, as Mehrotra, the new history teacher who travels 25 km every day to get to school, says, “The children here want to learn and excel. What else can a teacher ask for?” This year, the pass percentage in Class XII was 100 per cent while it was 63 per cent in Class X. Pappu Lal, a class XI student who was among those who mobilised the July 20 protest on NH 12, says, “If we could get a pass percentage of 63 without teachers, can you imagine what we would do with regular classes?” Hada, the math teacher who is within earshot, beams with pride.
