At Rangamatiya North High School in Nalchar, a single teacher is currently responsible for nearly 100 students. It isn’t an isolated anomaly. The Ministry of Education’s UDISE report for 2024-25 counted 340 Tripura schools running on just one teacher each, serving a combined 6,492 students; TET-qualified protesters outside the Teachers’ Recruitment Board this year put the figure closer to 370. The Opposition, citing a NITI Aayog report, claims more than 400 government schools fall into this category and roughly 18,000 teaching posts sit vacant statewide. Whichever count is most accurate, the pattern across all of them is consistent, and it should trouble any parent sending a child to a government school in rural Tripura: single-teacher schools average around 20 enrolled students each, while government schools overall average just 7 teachers compared to more than 16 in private schools covering similar enrolment.
The government’s response, laid out by Chief Minister Manik Saha in the Assembly in late August, points to real recruitment activity: 4,879 graduate and undergraduate teachers hired since the 2018-19 academic session, including 1,413 Post Graduate Teachers and 1,471 Graduate Teachers, plus 145 Special Educators and 117 School Librarians. A separate, more recent figure puts total recruitment at 5,215 teachers over five years, with a bulk hiring of 3,172 more teachers reportedly planned to address the current shortfall. These aren’t trivial numbers, and a government moving 5,000-plus teachers into classrooms over five years is not a government ignoring the problem.
What that recruitment record doesn’t fully explain is why the shortage persists at this scale despite years of hiring. The root cause, as Saha himself has acknowledged, traces back to 2017, when the Tripura High Court terminated the services of 10,323 teachers — a ruling the Supreme Court later upheld. That single event created a hole in the state’s teaching workforce so large that even sustained recruitment since 2018 has functioned mostly as partial repair rather than genuine expansion. Five thousand new teachers sounds substantial until measured against ten thousand three hundred lost in a single legal ruling; the arithmetic explains why single-teacher schools remain common eight years later rather than becoming a fading memory.
There’s a further complication worth flagging: the state has also deputed 2,684 teachers to TTAADC-administered schools to prevent disruption there, and Congress has separately objected to teachers being pulled for census duty, arguing that administrative deployments compound an already thin staffing base. Every one of those teachers assigned elsewhere is one fewer in a mainstream classroom already stretched past reasonable capacity.
None of this excuses the pace of recovery, but it does clarify what dailyArchives readers should actually be watching. The relevant question isn’t whether the government is recruiting — it plainly is — but whether recruitment is finally outpacing the 2017 shortfall rather than merely offsetting it, and whether the promised 3,172-teacher bulk hiring reaches the single-teacher schools carrying the heaviest load first, rather than being distributed evenly across a system where some schools need it far more urgently than others.
DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)