Agartala: The Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) has voiced serious concerns to chief minister Manik Saha over the deteriorating state of academic activities in schools, urging immediate intervention.TPCC president Asish Kumar Saha said the state’s education system is facing a crisis due to teacher shortages, stalled recruitment, school closures and the diversion of teachers to non-academic clerical work. He said teachers are being kept in schools for over eight hours and assigned administrative and clerical duties, leaving little time to prepare lessons, which adversely affects the academic environment.He said students’ interest in attending classes is declining because teachers have limited time for academic activities. He also alleged that, to maintain performance metrics, some schools manipulate attendance records, allowing students to appear for examinations regardless of actual attendance.Asish said around 18,000 teaching positions are vacant in Tripura, with over 400 schools being run by a single teacher. He added that many schools lack administrative staff despite an increase in official workload within educational institutions, forcing teachers into administrative roles and impacting academic performance.Asish flagged issues such as the shortage of English teachers in Vidyajyoti schools, the closure of educational institutions in rural and hilly areas, and the delays in distribution of textbooks to students, alleging books are often provided only about a month before exams.He expressed concern about the introduction of pre-primary and nursery classes in around 450 schools this year, arguing that it would add to the existing burdens on current teachers. The party demanded that the govt scrap its plan of appointing about 9,000 teachers and education workers to census-related duties.Asish accused the govt of compromising teachers’ primary responsibilities by involving them in census work and other govt tasks, which imposes physical and mental stress on them and affects students and their families. He proposed hiring educated unemployed people temporarily for census activities on contract. He also recommended utilising unemployed youth for booth-level officer (BLO) roles instead of teachers.He also raised concerns over a recent Supreme Court directive related to qualifications for the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), saying it could affect educators appointed before TET became mandatory. He estimated that over 10,000 teachers in Tripura could face uncertainty due to this directive and urged the CM to coordinate with the Union education ministry to pursue legal changes through an ordinance to protect the affected teachers’ employment.
