PUNE: While the State Government issued an advertisement for recruitment of around 10,001 teachers across Maharashtra on Thursday, more than a lakh aspirants expressed unhappiness, saying that the number of posts was too low.
After protests by aspirants’ organisations for over a year, the recruitment advertisement was declared on the Pavitra Portal, which will not be accessible to the applicants till March 2.
They will be able to update their preference lists after two days only.
“The candidates were hoping for the release of over 18,000 vacancies, as declared by the chief minister a few months ago. We are all certainly disappointed,” said Santosh Magar, Founder President, DEd BEd Students Association.
Magar claimed hardly 5,000 of the posts announced are from Zilla Parishad (ZP) and Nagar Palika schools.
“We had huge expectations from the posts at ZP schools so that a true corruption-free recruitment process takes place. Unfortunately, 5,000 is a very small number considering the number of actual vacancies and the number of candidates. As far as recruitment at the private schools, for which around 3,000 posts have been opened, we fear there will still be corruption there, and those who are able to afford bribes will get recruited,” he added.
Pointing out that another issue with the number of vacancies is the unfair distribution, Magar said, “More than 2,000 vacancies are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) category alone, and over 500 are reserved under Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) (PESA).”
He said during verification of the rosters, many schools and divisions had to be shut down for being bogus, and the teachers there had to be absorbed in other schools. This led to decrease in number of vacancies. Because the rosters have remained incomplete or unverified in the six districts, the government has only opened 50 per cent of the vacancies there for the time being. The association members plan to meet the State Education Minister, and voice their disappointment over the issue soon.
