Over 32,000 teaching posts lying vacant in Gujarat

AHMEDABAD: The discussion on the state of education in Gujarat heated up during the assembly elections a few months back, triggering a social media battle between AAP and the BJP. The state administration at the time claimed that the Gujarat education model was the best.

However, the same BJP government acknowledged on Wednesday in the assembly that more than 32,000 posts of teachers and principals are lying vacant in various government as well as grant-in-aid primary, secondary and higher secondary schools.

Education Minister Kuber Dindor informed the House in response to a series of inquiries from Congress MLAs about the state of education that, as of December 2022, there were 29,122 teachers’ positions and 3,552 principal positions vacant in the state-run as well as government-aided Gujarati and English medium schools across the state.

Assembly data also revealed that of these 32,674 vacant positions, 20,678 were left unfilled at government-run schools while 11,996 teacher and principal posts could not be filled in granted schools.
Almost 17,500 government primary teacher positions were unfilled in total. There are 1,507 positions vacant in the Kutch district alone, 1,152 in Dahod, which has a large tribal population, 869 in Banaskantha, 724 in Rajkot, and 692 in Mahisagar.

The information also showed that there are no government-run secondary English-medium schools for classes 9 and 10 in 14 out of 33 districts in Gujarat. Similarly, there are no English-medium higher secondary schools operated by the state government for classes 11 and 12, and there are no grant-funded English-language elementary schools in any of the 31 districts.

Among the claims of digital and science education, another startling statistic emerged. The majority of schools in the Jamnagar-Dwarka district lack computer labs. There are no computer labs in 490 Jamnagar primary schools and 337 Dwarka primary schools.

According to data, 506 primary schools in Jamnagar and 379 primary schools in Dwarka do not have a science experiment lab. Parthiv Raj Kathwadia, a spokesperson for Gujarat Congress, attacked the BJP government, saying “the BJP government is playing games with the future of students.”