It was like a durbar scene from the middle ages. A woman, advanced in years, pleads with the all-powerful ruler sitting on a raised platform meters away to help her. The ruler incensed that she has the temerity to raise her voice in front of him decrees: “Suspend her! Take her into custody, now!”
The woman was Uttara Bahuguna, a 57-year-old primary school teacher. The all-powerful ruler was TS Rawat, the chief minister of Uttarakhand. The incident took place on June 28, during a public hearing that the chief minister was presiding over. The state police, following Rawat’s decree, arrested Bahuguna on charges of “disrupting an important gathering”. She was later released on bail.
Bahuguna, who has worked as a teacher for 25 years, has been posted at a school in a remote part of the hill state for most of her career. Having lost her husband three years ago, and with just a few years left to retire, she had asked to be posted to the state capital Dehradun, where her son lives.
When Bahuguna raised her transfer request, Rawat asked her if she had not read the rules before she signed up for the job. Bahuguna retorted that she had not signed up for a life of exile. It was this sharp statement that riled Rawat whose wife, Sunita Rawat, also a government primary school teacher, has been posted at one school in Dehradun, the state capital, for the past 22 years.
Using the Uttarakhand government’s own classification, Sunita Rawat has had a sugam or desirable posting for 22 years and Bahuguna has had a durgam or undesirable posting for 17 years of the 25 years she has been a teacher. Under the terms of the state’s transfer rules, Sunita Rawat’s is a fit case for transfer to a durgam location and Bahuguna’s to a sugam one.
Political interference
Undesirable postings are usually to those parts of the country that are in most need of attention. Their inaccessibility is often the major reason for their underdevelopment, and their underdevelopment is the major reason most people who choose to work in government do not want to work there. This is as true for teachers – some of who turn down promotions for fear of an undesirable posting – as it is for doctors and administrators.
Uttarakhand, for example, offered medical students a fee discount if they signed a bond that required them to work in the state’s hilly districts for at least two years after they graduated. In 2014, of 331 doctors appointed on this basis and posted to rural health centres, only 66 turned up for work. That the government had to resort to a bond to get doctors to work in the state’s hilly districts is a reflection of the general disinclination of government doctors to accept postings to these areas.
Governments in India have not found a workable solution to ensure that the remote, underdeveloped, undesirable corners of India are properly served.
Political interference is at the root of the problem. State governments have rules, laws and now computer-aided systems to try and make transfers and postings transparent. But all their systems are all too easily subverted by politicians for whom postings and transfers are a source of enormous power. Those who are politically well-connected can expect to receive a transfer or posting request as a favour. The rest may have to pay. A civil servant, who has worked in a state education department said: “it is informally called the transfer industry…MLAs and education ministers make money on teacher transfers”. Teachers say, so do some bureaucrats.
Students suffer
Uttara Bahuguna’s case has focused attention on the insouciance of politicians who live in glass houses and on the heartlessness with which the system treats those who are not active Union members and not politically well connected.
But it also highlights what this system means for the communities that are supposed to be served. In the last 17 years, Bahuguna has been on leave for long periods – longer than a year at a time. She said this was because of her late husband’s poor health. At present, she has been on leave since August. This means that the school she is posted at, which likely has only a total of two or three teachers, has been short of a teacher, an experienced one at that.
This system works neither for Bahuguna, nor for her young students.