SRINAGAR: After rendering painstaking services for over seven consecutive years, the first batch comprising of over a thousand Education Volunteers (EVs) is all set to get regularized as General Line Teachers (GLTs) on Saturday.
The state government is scheduled to issue orders of regularization at a function that will be held at SKICC organized by the directorate of school education Kashmir. Since we have completed securitization of credentials, successful service, academic qualification; we are going to distribute regularization orders to EVs turned ReTs who will now function as general line teachers, Tara Chand, deputy chief minister who also holds education portfolio said.
The EVs have been appointed under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) Scheme in 2002-2003 and those who had completed five years of service as ReTs were yet to receive regularization orders.
After their appointment, EVs were supposed to hire a building for providing basic education to students from 1st primary to 5th standard. An Education Volunteer gets Rs 1000 as monthly honorarium for his services.
There are instances where EVs have rendered three to four years of service before being confirmed as ReTs. Under the said scheme the volunteer was supposed to be regularized after a period of 2 years by the State Government, but many a examples are being quoted EVs where they were regularized as ReTs after giving consecutive services of over four years.
The scheme was implemented in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002-03. For habitation as a unit of planning, the state government had sanctioned the Education Guarantee Centers (EGS) to the reserved habitations and appointed EVs in these centers following the same norms applied to appointment of ReTs.
According to the SSA norms after successful functioning for two years, the EGS are to be converted into primary schools and therefore the EVs too were supposed to be converted into general Line Teachers after being converted into ReTs for five years.
There are over 4500 EVs whose files are being scrutinized by the directorate of school education and sources in directorate said the committee that was constituted to go through these files have almost completed over a thousand cases for whom the orders would be issued in next few days. (KNS)