MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT (DR. SHASHI THAROOR)
(a) to (d) The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, prescribes that the Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) should be maintained at school level at 30:1 and 35:1 at primary and upper primary level, respectively. It also provides that there should be alteast one classroom for every teacher. As per the District Information System for Education (DISE) 2011-12 (Provisional), the PTR for all schools in respect of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand is 59:1, 44:1, 25:1, 34:1 and 40:1, respectively.
The Student Classroom Ratio (SCR) for all the schools in respect of Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand is 34:1, 27:1, 27:1 and 33:1, respectively, while for Bihar is 79:1.
(e) & (f) The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) conducts very detailed periodic national surveys of the learning achievements of children in classes III, V and VIII. Two rounds of these National Achievement Surveys have been completed by the NCERT, which have revealed improvements in learning levels, even though the overall levels are low.
(g) The RTE Act provides that all infrastructure facilities, including provision of teachers as per the prescribed PTR should be in place by 31st March, 2013. To ensure better PTR and SCR, 19.82 lakh teacher posts and 3.04 lakh school buildings and 17.92 lakh Additional Classrooms (ACRs) have been sanctioned up to 2012-13 under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme.
