Thiruvananthapuram: Even while Left parties are accusing the Central government of clandestine moves to use Aadhaar data in several fields, the state government has asked schools to give the UID data of all students. This, apparently, is to ensure that schools do not fudge data for more teachers’ postings. The Director of Public Instruction (DPI) in a circular asked the schools to upload on the website www.education.kerala.gov.in, the UID details of students who have not already registered in the sixth working day link of the website www.itschool.gov.in before January 31.
The decision came in the wake of finding that more than one lakh students in the general education sector do not have a UID number. Sources said that the decision was taken keeping in view the KER amendment that enabled the state government to redeploy protected teachers in aided schools also. The KER amendment was that every aided school should redeploy protected teachers in 1:1 ratio in future vacancies with the preference for first appointment going to the protected teachers.
In case of schools which have been upgraded after 1979, known in general education parlance as new schools, all appointments in vacancies should be from the pool of protected teachers. The practice till now was that protected teachers are redeployed in government schools only. They were teachers who became excess when the school or division become “uneconomic” when the number of students in a class fell below 20. Fr Jacob Palackappilly, secretary KCBC education council, told this newspaper that the present decision to amend KER to ensure the redeployment of protected teachers was against minority rights.
This was pointed out to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan by the delegation of bishops during their meeting. The previous LDF government under V.S. Achuthanandan had also tried to impose such a decision. It was quashed by the High Court. The meeting of the Catholic teacher’s guild scheduled to be held at Thrissur on February 24 would discuss the future course of action, Fr Palackappilly said.
