World-class education in Punjab still a challenge

During its election campaign, AAP had been claiming that it would turn government schools into world-class educational institutions. The party had given eight guarantees on the Education front to people. These included transforming the education system taking along teachers, regularising contractual job, change in the transfer policy, no non-TEACHING work for teachers, filling of vacancies, training from abroad, timely promotion and cashless medical facility.

However, a reality check reveals that in one year, not much change could be done in the direction of fulfilling the guarantees. The biggest issue before the election was regularisation of teachers. Six months back, CM Bhagwant Mann had announced that it would regularise 8,736 teachers but little has been done so far.

Another important guarantee was to stop getting non-teaching work from teachers. Though the government came up with the idea of appointing estate managers for carrying out non-teaching work, not much has been done in that direction. Between 10,000 and 15,000 teachers still render Services as booth-level officers.