Patna High Court’s Order on NIOS D.El.Ed Valid
Earlier, the NIOS D.El.Ed teachers were not considered for the Teachers Recruitment Exam in Bihar but the Patna High Court's order in January 2020 changed the scenario completely.
Ramesh Pokhriyal, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister said on Thursday that the order issued by the Patna High Court in regard to NIOS D.El.Ed teachers will be totally respected by the Government. The minister was interacting with the teachers via a webinar in which he responded to the complaints put forth by the NIOS D.El.Ed qualified candidates on Thursday.
Earlier, an order from the National Council of Teacher Education or NCTE was suppressed by the High Court of Patna which said that no candidate is eligible for the post of a regular primary school teacher who has completed the NIOS D.El.Ed course.
In the year 2017, the amendment of section 23 (2) of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009 saw an extension of the training period of in-service elementary teachers who were untrained to 31st March 2019. According to this amendment, all the in-service teachers employed in Government, Government-Aided and Private schools who were untrained were requested to acquire a minimum qualification. The responsibility of training these teachers fell upon NIOS who was asked to impart the training via the Open Distance Learning (ODL) mode.
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On the 03rd of October 2017, the NIOS D.El.Ed online course was started and by the month of March 2018, 13,78,979 untrained in-service teachers had registered themselves for the programme at the NIOS portal.
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The struggle began when these teachers were shunned by various recruitment agencies who did not include their qualification in their eligibility criterion. Later, in January 2020, the Patna High Court directed the Bihar Government to consider the candidature of these teachers for the teacher recruitment exam in its judgement. Bihar Government, like several other state governments, did not consider those who had received their 18-month diploma programme for its teacher recruitment programme.