The primary school in Koday Dih (Giridih district, Jharkhand) has 78 pupils but only one teacher, who is actually a para-teacher with rudimentary training. He manages this situation by dividing the children between the school’s two classrooms and shuttling between the two. When he is busy with administrative duties, which take a lot of his time, the children just mill around. When he is absent, the school is like a ship without rudder.
There is nothing special about Koday Dih – it is just one of Jharkhand’s numerous single-teacher schools. In the state as a whole, the proportion of single-teacher schools at the primary level is close to one-third, according to the Unified District Information System for Education. (Here and elsewhere, we are actually referring to government primary schools.)
The recent Gloom in the Classroom report sheds further light on the situation in Jharkhand based on a survey of 138 randomly-selected primary and upper-primary schools in 16 districts. About one third of the primary schools in the sample had a single teacher – generally a male para-teacher. The single-teacher primary schools had 51 pupils on average. Most of the pupils were Dalit and Adivasi children. These children, who bear the burden of centuries of exclusion from formal education and need the best schooling facilities today, are getting the worst.
