More than 60 marathi-medium private aided school managements have filed writ petitions before the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court demanding complete autonomy to appoint teachers. Currently, there are a total 66,750 primary-secondary schools statewide with an aggregate enrolment of 5.25 million children mentored by 450,000 teachers. Private-aided Marathi-medium schools number 20,120 (30 percent).

Private aided schools are a uniquely Indian phenomenon. Although promoted by private trusts and societies, salaries of their teachers and non-teaching staff are paid by the state government. The quid pro quo is that the tuition fees of private aided schools are calibrated by government to enable the children of lower middle and working class households to access them.

Until 2012, the tradition was that recruitment and appointment of teachers was the prerogative of private aided school managements. However in that year, the then Congress government of Maharashtra banned teacher appointments in private aided schools until ‘excess’ teachers in government and private aided schools were appropriately deployed.

Subsequently in 2017, the then Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena led government (2014-19) accused private aided school managements of indulging in widespread corrupt practices in recruiting teachers whose salaries are paid by government. In June 2017, a government resolution mandated registration of teacher vacancies on its Pavitra portal to ensure transparency and accountability in the teacher recruitment process.

Read:Maharashtra: TET scandals

Aspiring teachers who had written and passed the teacher eligibility test (TET) and/or the Maharashtra Teacher Aptitude and Intelligence Test (TAIT) were allocated to registered schools by the education ministry. In sum, teacher recruitment of private aided schools passed from their managements to government. Unsurprisingly, the recruitment process through the Pavitra portal is riddled with technical glitches with no teachers recruited since the first batch of 8,000 teachers appointed in 2017.

The Maharashtra Rajya Shikshan Sanstha Mahamandal (MRSSM), a representative body of 20,000 private aided schools and junior colleges, has always opposed teacher recruitment and appointments through the Pavitra portal on the ground that it dilutes the autonomy of privately promoted schools. MRSSM leaders contend that a full bench Supreme Court judgement in the landmark T.M.A. Pai vs. Union of India (2002) upheld the right of privately promoted professional education institutions to establish and ‘administer’ institutions of their choice. The right to administer includes right to recruit and appoint teachers of their choice.

“Many of our schools are operating with less than half the required number of teachers which has severely compromised the quality of education provided to children. It’s well-known that there is a steady exodus of children from government schools because quality of education they dispense is very poor. When the education ministry is unable to do a good job of its own schools, why should it continue interfering with our work? The government is also incapable of conducting a scam-free teacher eligibility test as evident from recent TET scams in Maharashtra. So, why should we hire TET cleared candidates with questionable qualifications?” argues Ashokrao Thorat, vice president, MRSSM, with reference to the arrest last December of commissioner of the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations for allegedly tampering with TET exam scores.

A ten-year jail term served by Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala in 2011 for master-minding a teachers’ recruitment scam and the recent (July) arrest of West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee on similar charges, indicate that teacher appointments in government schools is a flourishing racket nationwide.

Evidently, Maharashtra’s neta-babu brotherhood aspires to go one better by appointing teachers of private aided schools as well.