The vanguard of government services, that’s how retired bureaucrat and former Rajya Sabha member Jawhar Sircar describes schoolteachers.
Ever since the juggernaut that is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls or SIR rolled out in November across nine states and three Union Territories, schoolteachers have not had a moment’s rest.
Mita Das, who is the headmistress of a primary school in Calcutta, says, “Since school reopened after the Puja vacation, we have been apprehensive about SIR duty.”
Sabita Halder, a high-school teacher, adds, “I am working 12-13 hours every day, going door to door first to distribute the forms and then collect them.” The phone numbers of these teachers who have been designated BLOs (booth level officers) are printed on the forms.
Halder says, “I come home around 11 at night and spend two more hours digitally updating the data. I have to first scan the form and then upload it on the mobile app. And while I am doing this, the phone keeps ringing. The app hangs.”
Elina Sarkar, a primary-school teacher, says, “I can no longer tell the days apart. I am working impossible hours, and I cannot explain the kind of anxiety I am going through. I feel anxious even in my sleep.”
Another teacher, Trisha Dutta, explains the nature of her anxiety. She says, “I keep worrying that if anything goes wrong, if names go missing, the people in my neighbourhood will come after me.”
But then, here in India, it has always been customary to rope in schoolteachers for projects of “national interest”. And none of it has been easy.
“Flood, fire and famine…” says Sircar, referring to an old saying about how schoolteachers have always been enlisted for all kinds of national duties and emergencies. In different avatars, they are called by different names — BLO, census supervisor, child registrar, polling officer…
Shibnath Basak, 55, is a high-school teacher in North Bengal. He tells The Telegraph, “I have been tasked with election duty almost every year, barring the last few and that too because my mother was rather ill. I have been stationed in deep forested areas, border villages, remote tea gardens and even in the hills.”
Basak has an anecdote from 1998, when, he says, he barely escaped alive from the political turmoil at the booth where he was the presiding officer. Says he, “Back then, there were no EVMs; we would have to count the votes manually and declare the result. When this process was about to begin, local goons showed up, fully armed. They held us at knifepoint and made us count the votes. On learning that their party was losing by a few votes, they made us count again and again. We counted three times until they got their desired results.”
Ashok Halder, 58, a history teacher, has so far worked through 16 to 17 Assembly and general elections. He says, “I started my career in Burdwan, moved to Hooghly and finally to Calcutta a few years ago. While there has always been turmoil and tension on election days, things have become exceptionally bad in the last few years.”
Halder talks about things like goons walking in and threatening voters and polling
officers, casting false votes. He says, “When I tried to protest, they took away my bag, my phone and even my medicines.”
Both Basak and Halder and more than a dozen other teachers The Telegraph interviewed said there is no forum, no office that addresses such complaints.
But what is the reason behind this precedent? Sircar replies, “Sixty per cent of government servants are schoolteachers. They are our biggest manpower. In India, elections are an extensive affair. We need at least 4 lakh people on the ground, in the polling centres. Where would we get that many government servants? If outsiders are recruited, we wouldn’t know their affiliation. Only government employees can be trusted with this job, because they can be held accountable for any mishap.”
Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, professor of political science at Rabindra Bharati University, says, “In Africa, teachers are required for data collection, but only educational data, not electoral rolls, census or SIR. This only means that education is not given much importance in India. You must also note that during elections, schools are requisitioned a month ahead, and students have to suffer. When the Right to Education Act came into being in 2009, this rule of using teachers for electoral data collection and election duty became legalised. Now, teachers are being converted into data collectors.”
Roshni Parveen, a primary-school teacher, served as a child registrar twice in the post-Covid period. The Samagra Shiksha Mission, a central government initiative, requires schoolteachers to collect child-related data from a select area. Parveen says, “I was mapping two wards, almost 2,400 households. I had to document every child, check if they were going to school or had dropped out.”
She talks about how after a while it became commonplace to have doors slammed in her face, families dismiss her as a fraud and so on.
Raina Majumder, who served in the urban slums of Calcutta, says, “One person threw away my government ID card. Another man invited me in and offered me drinks. Since we were facing so much trouble, we had been advised to seek help from the police but they refused outright…”
Schoolteachers are also in charge of midday meals. This includes keeping a check on the school’s monthly budget and the standard of cooking. Das says, “Even two years ago, I had to collect the ration myself.” Basak says, “From supervising children’s diet, to administering medicine and iron supplements, everything is our responsibility.”
Ashok Halder, who is now on the verge of retirement, says bitterly, “Till 2010-2012, we received academic training, were sent for orientation programmes but all of that has stopped. As teachers, it seems we are required to do everything but teach. I will retire with a deep regret that I could not do the job I had signed up for.”
In other news, the Chief Electoral Officer, Kerala, has reached out to the state government seeking to utilise the services of school children for the ongoing SIR.
The schoolteachers The Telegraph interviewed did not want to be identified. Their names and locations have been changed.