Gujarat to make 'errant' teachers sweep campus, tend lawns

AHMEDABAD: Shirking teachers of government schools beware. The state government is planning to pull up bad teachers through social punishment.

"If a teacher is caught taking private tuitions, he may be asked to sweep the school campus for an hour every day, take extra classes or even turn gardener at the school he teaches," said a state education department official.s

A notification was issued by the state education department in this regard on Monday. The move comes after chief minister Anandiben Patel, during the recent Teachers' Day celebration, had said that social punishment will be used to teach shirking teachers a lesson. Governor O P Kohli had also drawn the government's attention to the rampant practice among teachers of running private tuition classes on the sly.

A teacher, requesting anonymity, said: "If the state government wants teachers to stop taking tuition classes, it should stop paying paltry salaries to ad hoc teachers. Let the government first give full time salary to teachers and then they are free to impose such restrictions," he said.

In the past too, the state government issued a circular banning private tuitions. The notification permitted each teacher to take only five tuition classes but also maintain a register containing names of the students taught there. However, this remained only on the paper and the state government made very little effort to implement the ban. Till date, only a couple of teachers were caught taking private tuition classes.