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Primary school teachers

School teachers are one of the first contacts of children to the outer world; therefore they form an important community in any society.

My community is search is based in a small, but relatively well to do village in gandhinagar named Kudasan. The village has one primary school upto std. 7^th, one secondary school upto std. 10^th and 3 anganwadi’s in the vicinity.

The primary school was started by the government in 1873, and the teachers are employed by the government. Their basic training takes place at PTC colleges, which are spread all across Gujarat. The teachers are first sent for an initial training of 10-20 days at various primary schools across Gujarat before they start teaching in the school.

The teachers are generally not transferred to other schools, unless they wish to do so at their own will. An interesting thing over here is that, all these teachers come from nearby locations ranging from Gandhinagar to Adalaj and other nearby villages, and most of them have done their training at the PTC College in Gandhinagar. Most of them are high school pass outs, and a few of them are also graduates.

Their pay scales are decided by the government and are lesser than that given to the secondary school teachers.

These people are generally much respected people in the community and parents trust them with their children., and are generally very trusted people in the society, when it comes to teaching the children about social values and generally educated the children about the health and other related factors. The products of this community are the children, who will shape the future of the country.

In the view of unicef:

Unicef believes in strengthening the existing system of these teachers rather than creating a new alternate system. Since the job involves a high degree of motivation, during their training, everyday 1 person is made to have a role-play of a motivator, and even after they start working, activities for motivation are recommended through the government.

But, apart from all this, they also admit that training is not the answer to every question, and sometimes, motivations like the monetary motivations become a bigger factor in this profession.

Schemes like ‘ Vidhyasahai’ are a part of such monetary incentive, where these primary school teachers are in a contract for 3-5 years for a fixed salary, and after that, according to seniority, and the work of each of the individual teachers, their payscale is increased to a certain value.