Shimla : Come rain in the morning and chances are many government primary schools in Himachal Pradesh will not teach for the day and call it a holiday quietly.
There are even schools who will decide to call it a day even if it starts raining during school hours, much to the joy of the students who merrily walk home in the rain.
This is the tradition in hundreds of primary level government run schools across Himachal Pradesh.
And nobody objects, not even the panchayats,the worried parents, the prominent and aware residents of the village.
The children are happy and the lazy teachers are the happiest of the lot,Who bothers if the future of school children suffers.
These teachers are almost all locals, so they get to sit at home on a rainy day and relax,attend to their private business’ even as they know their fat government salaries will be deposited automatically in their bank accounts, month after month.
This is a quiet pact between teachers and students.The rule is if it rains between 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. then there will be no school, so stay at home,even if the rain stops an hour later no problem play in the sun for the rest of the day at home.
But even more shocking is that there are also many schools where the teachers decide to declare a holiday if it rains during school hours.The children are naturally happy to go home.
This is a wide spread problem in schools of the hill state which claims to have the highest literacy rate and lowest drop out rate in the country.
Writer and Commentator Gurcharan Das often talks about the pathetic state of our government schools in the country. He says one out of four Indian school teachers is always absent and the other is highly incompetent.
So the future of our school children rests in the hands of the other two teachers, but in Himachal most of them are not in a mood to work on a rainy day, and the top authorities sitting in Shimla pretend they don’t know !
In a 20 year career published widely. He has worked for the BBC, AFP, The Statesman, IANS and the Business Standard . Known for his hard hitting writing and occasional off-beat stories. He lives in Shimla.
