Agartala, July 17 (IANS) The Congress has urged the Tripura government to exempt teachers of government-run schools from the upcoming census exercise and instead engage contractual staff for the enumeration process, citing an acute shortage of teachers and its adverse impact on academic activities.

In a letter to Chief Minister Manik Saha, Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee President Asish Kumar Saha said on Thursday that while the state government frequently speaks about improving the quality of education, government schools continue to face a severe shortage of teachers.

According to Saha, a former MLA, around 18,000 teaching posts at various levels of education are currently lying vacant, while more than 400 government schools are functioning with only a single teacher, as highlighted in a NITI Aayog report.

“In the interior and tribal-inhabited areas, a large number of schools have been closed due to various reasons. Owing to the shortage of teaching and non-teaching staff, academic activities have been adversely affected, leading to a decline in the quality of education,” he said.

Saha also added that the state government has announced plans to introduce pre-primary and nursery sections in 450 schools despite the continuing shortage of teachers.

The Congress leader said that his party has been consistently demanding that around 9,000 government school teachers be kept out of census-related duties, warning that assigning them to the exercise would severely disrupt academic activities across the state.

“Teachers should primarily focus on educating students and carrying out academic programmes. However, they are frequently assigned to various government administrative duties, including election-related work and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls,” Saha said in his letter to the Chief Minister.

He also demanded that the state government immediately launch a transparent recruitment drive to fill the large number of vacant teaching posts in government schools and address the acute shortage of teachers.

Meanwhile, Tripura Director of Census Operations, Ratan Biswas, said on Thursday that the first phase of the census — the Self-Enumeration process — would begin on Friday (July 17) and continue till July 31.

He said the second stage of the first phase — House Listing and House Enumeration — would be conducted from August 1 to August 30 across the state.

During this period, enumerators and supervisors, most of whom are school teachers, would visit every household to collect details of families and residential buildings.

Another official said that the second phase of the census, involving Population Enumeration, would be carried out in February 2027, during which enumerators and supervisors would collect detailed information about every individual, including socio-economic particulars.

Officials said that the training of thousands of census personnel, including enumerators and supervisors, was completed on Thursday ahead of the nationwide exercise.

–IANS

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