School education sector in shambles

According to insiders, the entire department has been made almost defunct as no steps are being taken to fill the vacancies at various levels.
“Be it the posts of Joint Director, Field Advisors, Chief Education Officers (CEO), Principals, Head of Departments (DIET) or ZEOs, the vacancies are rampant at every level,” said an official. “The result has been that the quality of education is going down fast, various schemes are not being implemented and funds are going lapse.”
According to insiders, the existing vacancies in the department include one post of Joint Director, two posts of Field Advisors (SIE Srinagar), five posts of CEOs, two posts of Principals DIET, 61 posts of principals of Higher Secondary Schools, 35 heads of departments in DIET and 28 posts for ZEOs and equivalent.
At Bandipora, Kulgam and Ganderbal the principals of local higher secondary schools are additionally functioning as CEOs, which according to experts is against the existing law and leads to mismanagement.
28 educational zones are vacant and they are being managed by adhoc arrangement. “As against a single officer supposed to manage one educational zone, currently a single officer is handling four zones simultaneously,” said an officer. “Every zone has around 500 teachers and one can imagine what justice he/she will do with so many teachers and schools.”
Since 2013 there has been no concerted effort to fill the posts and in some cases even the eligible officers have been transferred from their posts prematurely.
“The problem with principals acting as CEOs is that they are not trained for the job. They don’t know the schemes and how to handle the day to day administrative affairs of teachers, students and educational institutes,” said Rouf Ahmad Shahmiri, ex CEO Baramulla who was last year transferred and posted as Officer on Special Duty win the Monitoring Wing of Directorate of School Education Kashmir. “There are number of schemes for betterment of education sector, but the current lot of officials is either ill-informed or over-stretched to implement them.”
Insiders allege that the previous education minister had been at the forefront of delaying postings. “There were even promotions but the minister sat on their files and they were never allotted new postings,” said an official. “In Jammu there is no such problem and every zone is working fine without so many vacancies. The entire problem is with Kashmir division, where the former Education Minister is responsible for deliberately creating an anarchic situation to destroy the critical school education sector here.”
According to experts if the situation persists the education sector would be heading for darker days ahead. “Our buildings are crumbling, there is no monitoring of quality, effects of flood are still there and now in the absence of key officials, the situation is set to worsen,” said an official.
The director education Kashmir Tariq Ali Mir said that given the ranks of vacant posts the problem is at the secretary level. “Our office usually handles the lower level of postings and these posts were handled in secretariat.