Big Paydays Ahead for India’s Teachers

The self-evident proposition that the quality of education dispensed in the country’s schools is dependent on the entry of highly-educated and well-trained teachers, has dawned upon Indian society and the establishment. Suddenly remuneration packages are swelling across the board in Indian education Dilip Thakore For India’s estimated 9 million teachers’ community, September 5, designated Teachers Day in 1962 to commemorate the birthday of scholar-statesman Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (King George V Chair of mental and moral science at the University of Calcutta (1921-1932) and Spalding professor of eastern religion and ethics at University of Oxford (1936-1952)) who served as the Indian Republic’s first vice president and later president (1962-67), came and went with perfunctory celebrations to which this short-changed community has become accustomed. On the day, children countrywide expressed thanks and gratitude to their tutors with modest classroom gaiety, and newspapers devoted some column inches lauding their contributions to the national development effort. Yet lip service and ritual gratitude expressed by politicians, government officials and the parents’ community aside, the ground reality is that although they discharge the vital duty of educating the country’s future leaders and critical decision-makers, India’s teachers — particularly in 1.40 million K-12 schools nationwide with an aggregate enrolment of 230 million children at the start of every academic year (almost 200 million drop out at various stages of the education continuum) — are under-paid, unappreciated and over-worked. Within India’s 300 million-strong middle class, it’s rare for an aspirational upwardly-mobile household to encourage children to prepare for a career in academia, especially in K-12 education because salaries are so modest it’s almost impossible to maintain a middle class household on a teacher’s salary. Among the career counsellors’ community, it’s a wry joke that only those who cannot land a job in any other white collar vocation — law, engineering, medicine, government, business etc — enter the teaching profession.  However, there are straws in the wind that indicate this iniquitous situation is changing. The self-evident proposition that the quality of education dispensed in the country’s schools — and institutions of higher education — is dependent upon the entry and retention of highly-educated and well-trained teachers in the profession, is beginning to sink into slow-to-learn Indian society and the establishment. Suddenly, salaries and remuneration packages are swelling across the board in India’s under-performing schools, colleges and universities which languish at the bottom of all international comparative league tables. To its credit, the first initiative to upgrade the status of the teachers’ community was taken by the Union government’s Sixth Pay Commission (SPC, 2008) which sharply raised the pay-scales of teachers in Central government schools and higher education institutions by 100 percent with retrospective effect from 2006, forcing state government institutions and top-ranked private schools and colleges to follow suit. Consequently, SPC salaries prescribed for primary teachers in Delhi at Rs.23,000-30,000 per month and  became the benchmark for government and private schools countrywide, resulting in a sharp increase in teachers’ pay in education institutions across the board. “There’s no doubt that…