Recruited 4,656 teachers to provide quality education: Tripura CM

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha on Wednesday said that the state government has taken various significant steps to provide quality education to students and recruited 4,656 teachers in the last five financial years.

Answering questions of the MLAs in the Tripura Assembly session, the Chief Minister said that to provide better education, ‘Nipun Mission’ was launched in the state on November 18, 2022.

The National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) is a program launched by the Union Ministry of Education to ensure that all children in India have foundational literacy and numeracy skills by the end of Grade 3.

Saha, who also holds the Education portfolio, said that as part of the government’s steps to improve the quality of education, 10,182 primary teachers have been trained as ‘Foundational Literacy and Numeracy’ teachers under the ‘Nipun Tripura Mission’.

“As a result, activity-based teaching has commenced in schools,” he claimed.

He said that additionally, 200 Block Resource Persons and Cluster Resource Persons have been trained as master trainers to equip all primary teachers in the state for the implementation of Nipun Tripura.

“A specific teaching-learning material-rich space called the 'Nipun Corner' has been set up in classrooms across all schools under the Nipun Mission,” he further claimed.

He also informed the House that under the PM Poshan scheme, cooked meals are provided daily to all students studying in government and government-aided schools and madrasas from Class I to Class VIII.

He also mentioned that apart from mid-day meals, breakfast is provided on an experimental basis to 47,792 students from pre-primary to Class VIII in all government and government-aided schools and madrasas in Dhalai district, which is categorised as an aspirational district.

“To encourage teachers to create and use cost-effective teaching and learning aids with their own initiative, a state-level teaching and learning aids exhibition and competition was organised for the second time. In this exhibition, teaching and learning aids selected from over 160 district-level competitions were displayed, with a total of approximately 7,000 teachers participating,” he said.

He said additionally, to ensure that students admitted to Class I reach the appropriate level, a nine-week bridge course called the 'Vidya Setu Module' was introduced, modeled after NCERT.

The Chief Minister highlighted that teachers-parents conferences were organised twice simultaneously across the state to make parents aware of the state government’s mission and objectives.

“The classrooms at the pre-primary level have been made more attractive through various decorations under the 'BALA' (Building as Learning Aid) project. As a result, the number of students has increased to 12,253 from 3,352 in 2020-21,” he said.

He added that ‘activity-based’ teaching arrangements have also been implemented to enhance education at the pre-primary level, leading to an increase in students’ regular attendance in schools.

He noted that efforts to improve the quality of education have been strengthened through teacher recruitment by the Teachers' Recruitment Board, Tripura, via the TET examination.