Total teachers: 6,32,595 Pupil-teacher ratio: 25 Student-classroom ratio: 32 Avg teachers per school: 6.7 Namdev Polawad joined duty in exceptional circumstances. Just a day earlier, four Class XII students of the Vitthalrao Jadhav Arts and Science Junior College, a residential school in Dampur, a remote village in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, had tried to kill themselves, ostensibly to press their demand for a mathematics teacher. The high drama that followed forced the school to rush with appointment of Polawad as the new math teacher. On August 15, after the singing of the national anthem, the four Class XII students had taken a swig of what seemed like poison, tossed the bottles aside and jumped off the stage. The boys were rushed to a nearby hospital and soon declared out of danger. Notes recovered from the students said they were killing themselves because the school hadn’t appointed a math teacher and without one, their future was bleak. Two weeks later, all seems well. The school has a new math teacher, the four boys are back in school and their parents are happy that their children had had their way. “We are very happy that a teacher has been appointed. We have no grievance now. Maybe, we shouldn’t have done what we did,” says the oldest of the four boys, who is 21. The other three boys — all 18 — nod as he speaks. While two of them belong to families of farm labourers in Nanded district, one of the boys is from Yavatmal and another from a village near the school. The four are among the “brightest students” of the school, having passed their Class X exams with first class. A fortnight into his job, Polawad, who is an MSc student at a college in Chandrapur, says he understands the students’ anxiety. “I come from a village where there was only a primary school. It’s tough to be a student in these parts,” he admits. The government-aided residential school for nomadic tribes, with classes from I to XII, has a sprawling 3.5-acre campus with large playgrounds, dormitories for about 25 students, two large school buildings with classrooms for over 650 students, functional toilets and bathrooms. Last year, the school had a pass percentage of 85 per cent in the Class XII Board examinations. The four students say that despite these “facilities”, the lack of a math teacher bothered them. “We had nobody to teach us the subject. Since this is a residential school, there are no private tuitions here to fall back on,” says the 21-year-old. But the school management says the students overreacted. “We had told the students that a teacher was being appointed so they should wait. We are shocked at the extreme step they took,” says acting Principal P B Shivarkar. Deepak Kulkarni, Assistant Commissioner of the Social Welfare Department, who conducted an inquiry into the attempted suicide, praises the school for its “very good results”. “It is very difficult to get proper teachers to work at such remote places, especially when you need qualified teachers,” he says. The 21-year-old’s father disagrees. “How can it be that they don’t get teachers? People here are dying to get jobs,” he says.
