Response floors BMC: 14,000 apply for 70 posts of Marathi teachers

“Last year, we had got about 2,000-3,000 applications in these categories,” he said. Patil said, of the 14,000 applications, about 50 per cent are in open category and rest in reserved category.

The reserved category includes women, sportsperson, calamity affected, earthquake affected, martyrs children, and Other Backward Castes(OBC). The BMC has been inviting applications for various teaching posts in the education department since December 2. “We had received as many as 1,200 open category applications for graduate-B.Ed category to fill 139 posts.

There are about 250 vacant posts for teachers in the Graduate B.Ed category for secondary regional language mediums which include Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu and 115 vacant posts for HSC-B.Ed category for secondary regional language mediums, according to officials.

The applicants who apply under HSC-B.Ed category teach 5th to 7th standard students and those who apply under Graduate-B.Ed category teach 8th to 10th standard students.

According to Rukmini Kharatmol, Chairman of Education Committee, “This is a great feat that we have got overwhelming response for the recruitment drive and this only means that more people are keen to join as teachers.”

The recruitment drive which began on December 2 will end on December 14. According to BMC data, the number of teachers in Marathi medium schools have dropped to 4261 in 2010 from 4814 in 2009. Over 5,100 students have dropped out of civic body’s Marathi medium schools in the past one year. The number of students studying in Marathi-medium schools have come down to 1,02,214 in 2010 from 1,07,413 in 2009. This number was 1,32,725 in 2008. 

The drop out rates in BMC schools which have not decreased over the past three years can also be blamed at poor student teacher ratio, according to a senior official. “This is the reason we are recruiting teachers in such high numbers”, he said.