Total teachers: 4,64,018 Pupil-teacher ratio: 29 Student-classroom ratio: 24 Avg teachers per school: 3.5 The strength of the government middle school in Sehore, less than 100 km from Bhopal, is 11. Plus 1 — the land owner’s dog. He is the most regular in school, ambling in and out of the three class rooms, curling up on the floor and snoozing near the teacher’s desk, at times, all perky with his eyes pointed in attention. On a Thursday morning, he lies on the floor near the desk of Ramnivas Kushwah, the atithi (guest) teacher who is waiting for students to arrive. On the blackboard behind Kushwah is a diagram of the animal cell, with cytoplasm, ribosomes and other labels. Kushwah says he drew it the day before, “copied from my guidebook”, when he had just one student in his classroom. Today, he will simply change the date next to the diagram. The school, a cluster of three rooms built on a piece of donated land, has four students in Class VI, five in VII and two in VIII. Kushwah says the students are irregular to school, especially around festivals. “We have to teach topics we know nothing about,’’ says the 22-year-old guest teacher who hasn’t trained to be a teacher. “Yeh guide hi mera sahara hai (I rely on the guidebook),’’ says Kushwah, an arts graduate, as he waits for another teacher, Nirmala Yadav, to arrive. Yadav is a contractual teacher (government teachers who are eligible for a permanent job after three years). While Kushwah, who lives nearby, gets Rs 150 for the day the school is open, Yadav has a fixed monthly salary of Rs 5,000. She will have to wait another year to get a permanent job. The mother of two has to cover a distance of nearly 50 km to reach school. A major portion of that journey is a 40-odd km bus ride from Budhni to Rehti, but it’s the last stretch of over 11 km that troubles her because there is no public transport and she has to often hitch a ride. When Yadav finally arrives, it’s well past noon and she has to start thinking about the journey back home. The school, which falls in the Assembly constituency of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the Lok Sabha constituency of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, is among several schools in the region where the pupil-teacher ratio is skewed. So while schools in Madhya Pradesh have a pupil-teacher ratio of 29, only marginally higher than the national average of 26, on the one hand there are areas such as this where government schools have very few students and teachers, and there are other that have schools with surplus students. “Which parent will send his or her ward to such a school? Teachers are irregular and they can’t teach. I bet none of the students who pass out from here will go on to complete even Class X because they know nothing,’’ says Ramvilas Varma, a villager whose children go to private school. The two teachers listen without a word in protest. Yadav, an MA in political science, later admits the posting is a “punishment”. She is angry about complaints that she comes late to school. “It would have helped had these students been taught better in their primary schools. And now they blame us,’’ she says.
