India 8th in World for Respecting Teachers, Lags Behind in Paying Salaries

As per the Global Teacher Status Index (GTSI) 2018 by the Varkey Foundation, India is eight in the world when it comes to respecting the teachers. When it comes to salary, teachers are the least paid in India.

India is, in fact, ranked even below the developing neighbour Malaysia and other smaller countries such as Hungary, Chile, Czech and Columbia. According to the findings of the survey, the actual salary of teachers in India is much less than what is considered ideal. India stands at 26th number out of the 35 nations when it comes to paying. Meanwhile, countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Taiwan, and the USA are the top paying countries.

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Despite paying fewer salaries to teachers, Indian schools implement a pay cut for teachers if they don’t do the job well. As per the GTSI, more than 60 percent of Indians opined that teachers need to be given salaries according to the performance of their students. This means that if the number of students performing well is high, teachers deserve to get paid more and if the number of students performing well is not so high, the teacher should get paid lesser.

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As per the data shared in the survey, most of the countries are of the opinion that teaching should be made an outcome-based profession while the number of people who seem to agree with this has declined over the years. In the UK, only 74 percent of the people wanted to have such a system of paying teachers in the previous 2013 GTSI survey, but the number has now gone down to about 34 percent in 2018. A trend like this was also seen in other countries such as Finland for example.