No teacher for over 10,000 disabled kids

The government admits that of the 10,065 disabled students,7,523 need 1,505 special educators at a ration of 1:5. Again,the MCD alone has 2,087 disabled children in its schools.

A training programme for orienting 51,000 teachers in “inclusive education and various issues related to children with disabilities” in May and June 2009 remains a non-starter. The reason,the government says,was that teachers were deployed for the Lok Sabha elections.

“To begin with,50 special educators or resource persons are being recruited,” senior government counsel Najmi Waziri submitted,“scrutiny of the applications received and the constitution of the interview board is already complete. Interviews were postponed owing to the Lok Sabha elections and the implementation of the Model Code of Conduct”.

Dissatisfied with the government,the Bench found there were no rules for the recruitment of special teachers. “We want to suggest at least 25 schools should have special teachers,so that at least a 1,000 disabled children in the neighbouring areas can be brought there,” Chief Justice Shah said. But the very aspect of training special teachers is a tug-of-war between two warring statutory bodies – the Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI) and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).

“There is no teacher in any of these schools trained enough to teach a special child the concept of colour or Mathematics in Braille,” Major General (retd) Ian Cardozo,chairperson for the RCI,a statutory body to monitor and regulate education for children with disabilities,told the Bench in court.

Submitting that special teachers are offered “half the salary of a general educator”,Cardozo complained that the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) hardly co-operates with the RCI to equip teachers for disabled children. “The RCI and the NCTE are supposed to work in convergence to train special teachers. The NCTE remains a roadblock,” he submitted in court.

A letter dated May 27,2009 from NCTE member secretary Hasib Ahmad to Waziri places the whole responsibility of special children’s education on the RCI. “The mandate given to the NCTE covers the entire gamut of education. The education of special children,however,or laying down the guidelines for the recruitment of special teachers for them does not fall within the purview of the NCTE,” Ahmad wrote.

Even as the government counsel says that the process of having a special teacher in every school will be “cumbersome”,the Bench said “one special teacher in one school in each of the 12 districts of the Capital would be a good beginning”. The case will be heard next on July 1.