Chaibasa ranks last; Ranchi, Gumla, Lohardaga and Seraikela also hit by severe staff crunch
Mail News Service
Ranchi, May 29: Despite a marginal 1.31% overall improvement in the Jharkhand Academic Council (JAC) Class 10 results this year, the performance of major districts including Ranchi, Gumla, Lohardaga, Seraikela and Chaibasa has significantly worsened. Chaibasa now ranks at the bottom across the state.
An investigation revealed that the root cause behind the decline is a massive shortage of teachers and lack of infrastructure. Chaibasa has the worst ratio, with 63% of teaching positions vacant. Gumla follows with a 37% shortfall and Ranchi with 20%. In Lohardaga, 45 out of 199 sanctioned posts remain unfilled.
The lack of regular academic monitoring and teachers being burdened with non-teaching tasks are compounding the crisis. Teachers’ association leaders claim that many educators are frequently diverted to clerical and administrative duties, even struggling to receive their salaries on time. This leaves them with less time and motivation to focus on students.
In Ranchi, DEO Vinay Kumar attributed the drop in performance partly to the migration of five top-performing schools to CBSE. “Monitoring of affiliated schools is difficult. We’ve sought subject-wise performance data from school principals for review,” he said.
Show-cause notices have been issued to the DEOs of the five poorly performing districts. The state education secretary is expected to review their responses before announcing corrective actions.
Lohardaga’s in-charge DEO Abhijeet Kumar acknowledged the shortcomings and said a school monitoring roster will be implemented soon to address academic negligence. Experts warn that without immediate recruitment and systemic reforms, improving results will remain a distant goal.
