According to a recent study carried out by the Teachers´ Union, an umbrella organization for teachers across the country, Karnali´s schools open only 137 days a year on an average.
Karnali´s schools run 83 days less than the number of days stipulated by the Act. This has come as a shocking revelation to policy-makers at the Ministry of Education (MoE). “We never anticipated that the outcome of study would be so startling,” Dhruba Regmi, under-secretary at MoE, says.
Regmi, who was involved in the study conducted with financial support from the United Nations Children´s Fund (UNICEF), says, “Schools remain closed for 35 days just because students go in search of Yarchagumbas.”
Scores of local festivals and freezing winter are other contributing factors that force schools in Karnali to remain shut. Students do not attend schools in winter. They engage themselves in collecting firewood. Besides, they also help their parents in farming.
The School Sector Reform Program (SSRP) says that a teacher must spend at least 1,000 hours in classrooms a year. They must spend an additional 500 hours in other school-activities. In the primary level, teachers are expected to spend only 800 hours a year.
But, the ideal guideline that SSRP envisions does not exist in Karnali.
“Situation of Karnali´s schools is more dismal than what our study reveals,” Krishna Dhakal, president of the Teachers´ Union, says. According to Dhakal, many teachers do not teach students even when schools are open. “Most teachers are from outside Karnali,” Dhakal says. “Once they go home, they take months to come back to schools.”
Most teachers delay their return since there is a dearth of flights. While some teachers genuinely do not find flights, some just hang around on the pretext of not obtaining flight tickets. However, all of them, Dahal says, draw regular salaries. They do not take leaves while outside schools.
Suresh Joshi, now at the Department of Education (DoE), who worked as District Education Officer in Jumla for some years, recalls that he once found 40 teachers absent all at once. “This is not uncommon in Karnali,” Joshi says. “No one complains against them.”
Going by what Min Bahadur Shahi, who now runs a Karnali-based NGO, believes, geography is not a major hindrance to development of the country´s underdeveloped region. “Rather, it is education,” Shahi says. Shahi´s own personal experience of studying in Kalikot of Karnali has been bitter. “I started learning English alphabets only at grade four and grammar at grade eight,” he recounts. “I never saw faces of English and Science teachers throughout my schooling,” he says. “I studied on my own.”
Shahi, who is in frequent touch with people from Karnali through his NGO, bluntly says that educational condition has not improved as of today. “No one is serious about how children in Karnali get educated,” Shahi states.
The sorry state of Karnali´s schools is well-reflected in the national arena. Be it civil service or other fields, only a few people born and brought up in Karnali have got their share.
According to a 2005 report by Karnali Integrated Rural Development and Research Center (KIRDAC), only 13 persons from Karnali were section officers in civil service. A few had managed to reach joint-secretary level.
“No one from Karnali is secretary in government service,” Shahi says. “A couple of persons from Karnali have earned PhD in their respective fields. But, that is because they were fortunate enough to get educated outside the wretched zone.”
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