UP Govt Keeps Over 5 Lakh Posts Vacant, Shortage of Teachers Crippling for Education

Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has been boasting of successful implementation of a fair and transparent recruitment process in government services and the best ‘law and order’ the state has seen in the last 15 years. However, according to the government data as on April 1, 2019, there are over 3.25 lakh vacancies in different government departments of the state against a sanctioned strength of 12.64 lakh, with the maximum vacancies in the police department. The number climbs up to about five lakh if the number of vacant teachers’ posts is added to it.

Even as the recruitment process for 69,000 posts of teachers in the Basic Education Department is underway, the shortage of teachers in primary, secondary as well as higher education has left the sector severely crippled. Most alarming is the condition of the primary schools, where out of the total 4.12 lakh sanctioned posts, 1.8 lakh posts lie vacant.

In the government-aided Parishadiya schools, 4,500 posts of teachers and 1,500 posts of clerical cadre are said to be vacant. Similarly, about 32,000 posts of teachers are vacant in aided schools in secondary education and about 6,000 posts in government schools. This is notwithstanding the ongoing recruitment for 10,768 teachers in the government schools. In case of the Higher Education Department, including aided and government colleges, about 8,000 posts are said to be vacant, as per the data. 

On the other hand, the lack of police personnel seems to be paralysing law and order in the state. For instance, Uttar Pradesh has 1,40,105 posts lying vacant in the state police department against the sanctioned strength of 4,15,315.

As per the data provided by the government officials, the total number of vacancies mentioned does not include vacancies in public sector institutions and aided institutions. There are 97,163 posts of employees in public sector institutions. Similarly, there are 7,12,435 posts in aided institutions. Of these, 5,96,490 posts alone are related to the teachers and other personnel in the Basic Education Department.

For the last couple of months, a large number of unemployed youths across Uttar Pradesh have been protesting in all major districts of the state against massive joblessness.

“Although the Yogi government claims to have provided lakhs of jobs recently, most of those claims remain on papers. As per government data, there are around 16 lakh state employees in different departments. Recently, a proposal to give dearness allowance (DA) to these employees was announced by the Yogi Adityanath government. Besides, around 8 lakh new posts for teachers were sanctioned in the state. However, ever since BJP came to power, they have only canceled the sanctioned posts, which includes grade IV employees. Not only this, before BJP came to power in the state, there were around 3.99 lakh teachers in the state since the previous Akhilesh government had increased the number of posts,”  Rajesh Sachan, convener of Yuva Manch, Uttar Pradesh told NewsClick.

He added, “The CM keeps claiming that his government has completed the recruitment process of over 1.25 lakh teachers in the Basic Shiksha Parishad schools. The total number of teachers should be around 5.24 lakh in that case, but government data reveal that it is around 3.15 lakh in primary schools. Where have 2.09 lakh teachers gone?”

Speaking about the new norms introduced by the government, he told NewsClick, “The Yogi government also changed the norms for the recruitment process of principals at primary and upper primary levels. As per the new norms, for any primary school, if it has 100 students in the primary school and 150 in the upper primary school, the government will sanction a post of the headmaster there and if it is below that, there will be no headmaster. There are around 1.58 lakh schools in the state and after new norms, the government has sanctioned only 32,000 headmasters. The remaining 1.26 lakh posts of headmasters were canceled during this process.”

Further, schools with less than 100 students are either to be merged with neighbouring schools or be closed permanently. “If this is implemented, around 10,000 schools will be closed and 50,000 teachers' posts will be cancelled, as on an average, one school will have at least five teachers,” Sachan claimed.