The Bengal education department has mandated that a government college teacher will be eligible for promotion only if the person has registered at least 70% attendance in classes and has completed a PhD.
The department has also introduced a grading system based on classroom attendance. The new career advancement scheme, tied to class attendance and the completion of a PhD, was unveiled on December 31.
Welcoming the move, Lady Brabourne College principal Siuli Sarkar said the regulation “will make teachers accountable”.
“There are teachers who skip classes in the name of pursuing personal research or attending refresher courses. Students suffer because of this. The new promotion regulations will ensure that teachers attend at least 70% of the classes in a semester,” Sarkar said.
She added that the four-year undergraduate programme introduced under the National Education Policy (NEP) was exhaustive and required teachers to spend more time in classrooms.
An education department official said the new promotion rules were likely to be extended to government-aided colleges at a later stage.
The promotion guideline issued on December 31, 2025, states: “A teacher (assistant professor grade I) shall be promoted (to higher grade up to the level of associate professor) if the teacher gets the satisfactory or good grade in the annual academic performance assessment reports of at least three/four/ five of the last four/five/six years of the assessment period as the case may be, as specified in Appendix 1, table 1.”
Appendix 1 outlines the criteria for determining whether a teacher’s performance is graded as “good” or “satisfactory”.
According to the table accompanying the appendix, a teacher who has conducted 80% or more of the assigned classes will be awarded a “good” grade. If the number of classes taken is below 80% but 70% or above, the grade will be “satisfactory”. Teachers registering less than 70% attendance will be graded as “not satisfactory”.
The guidelines also link promotions to the completion of a PhD. They state: Assistant professors who have acquired a PhD degree after completion of 4 years of service and before completion of 6 years of service shall be eligible to move to assistant professor (senior level/ academic level II) from the date of award of PhD degree, subject to the fulfilment of other eligibility criteria.”
Until now, the career advancement scheme was primarily based on an academic performance indicator (API) score, which was calculated solely on the basis of research output, such as paper publications and the nature of academic research being pursued.
“Promotions were never so explicitly linked to the number of classes a teacher attended,” the education department official said. “The university grants commission (UGC) is insisting on this now. The UGC came up with its guidelines on promotions in 2018. The education department has framed its career advancement guidelines in line with the UGC directive.”
The official also stressed the importance of a PhD for teachers in higher education. “A teacher in a higher education institution must be armed with a PhD, as it reflects whether the teacher has the necessary proficiency to teach the subject,” the official said.
The new promotion regulations come amid recurring allegations that teachers in Bengal are not as committed to teaching as they are to agitations for pay hikes.
Metro had earlier reported academic and poet Shankha Ghosh speaking at an event in February 2015 about what he described as the perennial problem of teachers skipping classes.
“I saw teachers protesting against poor pay in the late 50s. The agitation was legitimate as the salary was then abysmally low. But I also noticed that we weren’t too interested in doing our job. We still aren’t serious about taking classes. We skip classes frequently, yet we demand a hike in salary. This lack of accountability is a form of corruption,” Ghosh had said at the launch of Bharat: Unnayan O Banchana, the Bengali translation of An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. Ghosh, who taught Bengali, retired from Jadavpur University in 1992.
Reiterating her support for the new rules, Lady Brabourne principal Sarkar said the main responsibility of a college or university teacher was to hold classes, making it imperative to link classroom attendance to career advancement.
“In a research institute like ISI, Calcutta, teachers have a lighter class load because they are primarily expected to conduct research. But a college or university teacher is required to hold regular classes so that the syllabus can be completed on time under the semesterised system,” she said. “So attendance should be considered while promoting a teacher.”