Credit: iStock photo
For more than a decade, Karnataka has made the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) a mandatory gateway to government school jobs, holding out the promise of quality teaching and merit-based recruitment.
Today, that promise rings hollow. Nearly 4.5 lakh candidates have cleared the test since 2014–15, yet only 28,277 teachers have been recruited.
Thousands of qualified candidates now find themselves stranded, staring at the prospect of becoming age-barred.
The irony is striking: the Department of School Education and Literacy has the highest number of vacancies in the state government, at 79,694 posts. A responsible government would treat this as an emergency, given the direct impact on classrooms and learning outcomes. Instead, recruitment has been paralysed.
The government’s primary defence is the unresolved issue of internal reservation within the Scheduled Castes.
Since October 2024, recruitment was effectively frozen while the state awaited the recommendations of the Justice H N Nagamohan Das Commission; it later attempted to implement a sub-classification formula. Legal challenges followed swiftly. Interim orders of the High Court, and broader Constitutional questions about breaching the 50% reservation cap laid down in the Indra Sawhney judgment, have resulted in a prolonged stalemate.
While the Karnataka Scheduled Castes (Sub-classification) Bill, 2025, has been passed, appointments remain on hold pending the court’s final verdict. This legal and policy tangle may explain the delay, but it does not justify the human cost. For lakhs of eligible candidates, this prolonged uncertainty has meant crushed hopes and wasted years. They appeared for the TET, assuming timely recruitment would follow. Instead, the test has become, as many ruefully put it, a burden rather than a bridge to employment. If the government cannot recruit, it should at least suspend the test until these issues are resolved.
Compounding the problem is the state’s decision to plug the gap by hiring over 50,000 guest or temporary teachers. Experience from other departments shows that temporary appointees eventually demand regularisation, leading to an entirely new problem for the government to resolve. More importantly, frequent teacher turnover undermines continuity and adversely affects learning outcomes in government schools that cater to the most vulnerable children.
A pragmatic approach would be to set aside the internal reservation issue for the School Education and Literacy Department for the present and proceed with recruitment under the earlier policy. Internal reservations can be implemented prospectively to fill vacancies arising in future. To hold an entire generation of qualified teachers and students hostage to an unresolved legal battle is neither just nor sensible. When such paralysis afflicts the education system, it amounts to a theft from the future.