When teachers are general dogsbodies

It may sound like a lofty claim. But my experience as a primary school teacher has taught me that teaching is not just another occupation. "A teacher’s engagement with education extends throughout the day and beyond — teaching in school and constantly learning outside it. But our education system seems to think otherwise,” laments Amlan Bishnu, a primary school teacher at Ghoshpur GSFP School in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas.

During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, Bishnu and three of his colleagues were assigned duties as booth-level officers (BLOs). Of the seven teachers in his school, four were away on BLO duty for nearly six months. “Imagine how the school functioned during that period, with only three teachers to take care of six classes. Ours was hardly an isolated case — about 70 per cent of primary school teachers were engaged in the SIR exercise,” says Bishnu.

His recent experience points to a deeper malaise in India’s elementary education. We worry about learning outcomes, revise curricula and talk about digital classrooms. Yet the very people expected to translate these aspirations into actual learning are routinely pulled out of classrooms for elections, electoral roll revisions, the Census and other administrative assignments. The schoolteacher has effectively become the State’s readily available reserve workforce.

The Calcutta High Court has now raised serious questions about this practice, reacting to a directive from West Bengal’s School Education Directorate (3 August 2026) that states: ‘Census work should be done in such a way that academic activities in the school are not affected. The teacher may perform Census activities post class hours or during the weekends.’

Justice Krishna Rao has asked: if teachers spend the day at school and then perform Census duty after school and even on Sundays, where is the time for rest, family and personal life?

And where, asks Archana Mondal, a primary school teacher in Cooch Behar’s Arambari Primary School No. III, is the time to “read books, watch films and documentaries, or discuss educational issues with colleagues — the very activities through which a teacher continually sharpens her professional abilities?”

An important legal qualification protects the government in this regard. Section 27 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, which generally prohibits the deployment of teachers for non-educational purposes, makes exceptions for the decennial Census, disaster relief and elections to local authorities, state legislatures and Parliament.

But what the law permits as an exception cannot be allowed to become an administrative routine. Once the exception becomes the norm, the very purpose of protecting the teachers’ essential instructional role is defeated — particularly in a country where teachers remain a scarce and unevenly distributed resource.

UDISE+ 2024–25 data show an improvement in India’s overall pupil-teacher ratio. But national averages conceal sharp inter- and intra-state disparities. Some schools are relatively well staffed; others operate with severe shortages, forcing a single teacher to handle several classes. The problem, therefore, is not merely the aggregate number of teachers but their uneven distribution.

The consequences are visible in Archana Mondal’s own experience. The two teachers in her school who were excused from SIR duty had to take on additional classes. Teachers had to manage multiple grades, timetables were disrupted, and teaching, co-curricular activities and sports all suffered. Most tellingly, she says, children failed to achieve the expected grade-level competencies in the third periodic assessment.

Non-teaching duties, then, are not merely an inconvenience for teachers. They can result in measurable educational loss.

There is a human cost as well. Mondal’s assigned booth was 17 km from her home. Voters were often not at home, necessitating repeated visits; long hours were spent collecting and verifying information. Political pressures and concerns about personal safety added to the physical and mental exhaustion. As head of her school, she was a helpless observer as the quality of teaching deteriorated.

All this leads to a simple question: why teachers? India has a vast pool of educated unemployed young people. Many of them could be trained for the tasks currently assigned to teachers. Such tasks certainly require proper training and supervision, but most do not demand the specialised professional skills of a trained teacher.

Of course, statutory functions that must legally be performed by designated government officials cannot simply be outsourced. But there is considerable scope for creating a trained auxiliary workforce for enumeration and other support functions.

There is a compelling economic argument as well. The state spends substantial resources recruiting and training teachers and developing their specialised pedagogical skills. To use this scarce professional resource for work that others can perform after relatively short training is poor human-resource management. In a country that simultaneously has teacher-deficit schools and large numbers of educated job-seekers, it makes no sense to repeatedly pull teachers out of classrooms.

The burden is also socially unequal. Children attending government primary schools disproportionately come from less privileged households. Better-off families can partly compensate for disrupted schooling through private tuition, online resources or alternative schools. Poor families usually cannot. Pulling teachers out of government schools therefore amounts to a regressive transfer of costs: the state economises on administrative manpower while the poorest children pay through lost learning.

This is why the recent ‘School Thik Karo’ campaign deserves attention. Abhijit Dipke and the Cockroach Janta Party have sought to shift the public debate from irregularities in examinations to the wider crisis confronting government schools — teacher shortages, inadequate infrastructure and quality of education.

The issue acquired a disturbing dimension in Bankura. According to reports, CJP volunteer Abdul Hafiz was attacked in his home on 13 August after filming conditions at his former government school in Karishunda village (under Indas police station). His father, Sheikh Mohammad Mafik, was seriously injured in the attack, and subsequently died on 15 August.

Whether the assault was politically motivated, as the CJP alleges, or not, as the state government maintains, is a matter for further investigation. But the episode suggests something deeply disturbing: for some sections of society, even the demand to reform government schools is a threat.

One is compelled to ask: how have teacher shortages, irrational deployment, weak infrastructure and the routine diversion of teachers to administrative duties been allowed to persist for so long?

There is no evidence to suggest that a single organised interest deliberately sustains this situation. But the status quo invariably has its beneficiaries — those who profit from the expanding private education market, those who evade accountability for the failure of public schools, and an administration accustomed to treating teachers as a convenient pool of manpower.

The remedies are hardly revolutionary, but they require one essential recognition: a teacher’s time is not spare capacity at the disposal of the State. Its first claimants are the children. Archana Mondal puts it more simply. When a teacher is simultaneously expected to teach and function as a BLO, an SIR worker and ad hoc administrative functionary, “the children are the ones who are deprived”.

A teacher cannot be treated like any other government servant. But the system continues to send the opposite message: teachers are simply cogs in a wheel, to be put to use as the government deems fit. Over time, such a system does not merely take teachers away from classrooms; it trains them to think of teaching as subordinate. That is the deeper moral cost. If we want committed teachers, the system must respect what teaching demands. Otherwise, we must ask: are we training our teachers to be anything but?

Kumar Rana is a research activist. More by him here