Teacher Education under Attack

According to the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), there are 11880 recognized Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) in India. NCTE is the nodal agency for recognizing, regulating and monitoring teacher education. It was constituted by an act of Parliament. There are several courses ranging from Diploma in Teacher Education (D.T.Ed) to Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) to Master of Education (M.Ed) to Master of Philosophy in Education (M.Phil) to Doctor of Philosophy in Education (Ph.D) under the ambit of NCTE. Diploma to Doctoral degree in Physical Education are also offered by NCTE recognized TEIs.  There are educational courses for special children offered by the NCTE. Currently there are over 10 lakh students enrolled in several courses offered by the NCTE recognized TEIs in the country.

NCTE is headquartered in New Delhi and its regional centres are in Jaipur, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar and Bengaluru. In a sudden stroke of pen, NCTE has made the regional centres null and void. From now on, the entire teacher education of India will be governed from the national headquarters. In the age of decentralized governance, NCTE opts for totally centralized governance. What an anti-development attitude of NCTE? There are reasons for making regional centres redundant. Corruption creeping to the grass root governance of NCTE regional centres has compelled the judiciary to direct the NCTE to clean up the system. Taking advantage of the Court directions, NCTE has completely centralized its job.

First of all, NCTE must introspect, why it created regional centres? Is it possible to monitor such a huge number of TEIs from the national capital? If corruption is the core issue then the NCTE headquarter must crack down corrupt elements in its regional centres through flying squads, anti-corruption bureaus and vigilance departments. It is popularly said now, instead of decentralized corruption now there will be a centralized corruption. If government and judiciary are keen on eliminating corruption then nobody can stop it. But the mere lip service on removal of corruption won’t remove corruption in the country especially in the NCTE and TEIs.

Apart from neutralizing regional centres, NCTE has outsourced its work to a private agency called Quality Council of India (QCI) for inspection and ranking TEIs. This will pay way for commercializing teacher education further. Earlier QCI was given the task of monitoring TEI websites for an annual payment of Rs.3000/- Even TEIs don’t spend this amount to create their websites. Just to monitor TEI websites, QCI was paid Rs.3000 by nearly 10000 TEIs. Why to collect Rs.3 crores for monitoring websites?

By pressurizing TEIs to either follow the overnight diktats or getting it shut down, NCTE has been killing the teacher education system very fast. After emboldened by this blackmailing technique, now NCTE has devised devastating rules.

One, TEIs should share the interests from the fixed deposit amount of Rs.15 lakhs with the NCTE. The fixed deposit amount belongs to the TEIs which has been put in the joint account with NCTE, so that the amount is not withdrawn abruptly. This safe route has been taken advantage by the NCTE and threatening to demand its cut from the interest income of fixed deposits of NCTE.

Two, NCTE has made QCI as the inspecting agency. A private agency with no academic expertise to check the quality of teacher education has been given this extraordinary work is really appalling. The inspection fee for each TEI is Rs.1.5 lakh. With nearly 12000 TEIs in the country the inspection fee alone will come Rs.200 crore per annum. What is the government intend to do? By commercializing the teacher education, government is sending wrong signals for the future growth of the country.

India’s steady progress is due to the education sector. Nobody should forget that our difficult education system has produced some wonderful minds for the world. Despite several bottlenecks, Indian education has been providing its service. If the Government wants to make it to the international standards it should help the private sector to offer high quality education at lower costs. A commercialized education setup will completely ruin the country. All the advantages India accumulated all these years with the education will vanish in the air in no time. NCTE must put down its habit of washing away its responsibility and handing over a major area of national development – teacher education to a private enterprise. It is now or never!