The National Award to Teachers 2021 has been conferred to 44 teachers from across the country, the lowest since the Central Government set the bar higher to "rationalise the process" in 2019. But this year was the lowest in terms of another major aspect as well — the number of female awardees. Only ten women teachers have been conferred the award this time around.
This year's stats took a sudden drop from last year's, which was nearly double the number. NAT 2020 saw 18 female teachers bag the award. But one might say that the absolute numbers do not matter. What about the share of women awardees as compared to the total number of awardees? The picture is not pretty here either, very evidently. While only 22.73 per cent of the teachers awarded this year were female, the previous year recorded the highest since the revamp of the rules — 38.30 per cent. The rules and criteria for being awarded the National Award were revamped and the number of teachers being felicitated was heavily cut down from over 300 in the previous years. One has to be truly extraordinary to be selected for the award now. Reportedly, the restructure was to add "more prestige and lustre" to the award. But the question that begs to be asked is why the number of female teachers is so less every year even though the number of female teachers has been on the rise.
Women school teachers in India, for the first time ever, outnumbered their male counterparts this year. This was according to the Unified District Information System for Education report for 2019-20. Out of the 96.8 lakh teachers in the country, 49.2 lakh are women. But the devil is in the details. The women dominate the primary classes while men are a majority when it comes to secondary onwards. As per the UDISE 2019-20 data, there are 19.6 lakh female and 15.7 lakh male teachers in primary schools. Upper primary classes have 11.5 lakh male and 10.6 lakh female teachers. Post this level, the gap widens. In the secondary level, the men overtake the women — there are 6.3 lakh male and 5.2 lakh female teachers, while in higher secondary the gap increases even more — 3.7 lakh male to just 2.8 lakh female teachers. The number of male teachers in government schools was also found to be higher than in private schools.
The Government of India started conferring these awards from 1958. "This award programme is designed to honour and celebrate the unique contributions of some of the finest teachers in the country who, through their commitment, have enriched the lives of their students and improved the quality of school education," says the official website of the awards. The awards are presented every year on Teachers' Day (September 5) by either the President or the Vice-President of India. The award allows self-nomination — school teachers and heads of government and government-aided schools, CBSE and ICSE affiliated schools can file nominations. The applications are then judged under two categories — objective and performance. The former, which takes into consideration the objective of the teacher and the logic behind it, constitutes 20 per cent of the total points. The latter — the performance criteria — judges how well the work has been done. "Under this, teachers will be awarded marks on criteria based on initiatives to improve learning outcomes, innovative experiments undertaken, organisation of extra and co-curricular activities, use of teaching-learning material, social mobility, ensuring experiential learning, unique ways to ensure physical education and so on," says the website. This takes up 80 per cent of the total points awarded.
