Tamil Nadu will move the Supreme Court against its order requiring in-service teachers to clear TET within two years or face compulsory retirement. The state says applying the rule retrospectively is “unfair and unsustainable.”
New Delhi: The Tamil Nadu government has announced that it will file a Review Petition before the Supreme Court against its recent ruling that all in-service teachers who do not have the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) qualification must pass it within two years or else face compulsory retirement.
School Education Minister Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi explained the state’s position. He said that while the government has no objection to TET being a compulsory qualification for future appointments, applying it to teachers who were already recruited years ago is not acceptable.
“While the state fully supports TET as a compulsory requirement for all future teacher appointments, applying it retrospectively to existing teachers is unfair and unsustainable.”
On September 1, the Supreme Court had ruled that teachers who fail to clear TET within the two-year period will be compulsorily retired with terminal benefits.
The court also said that teachers with less than five years of service left before their natural retirement could continue till then, but they would not be considered for any promotion.
Tamil Nadu currently has nearly 1.75 lakh teachers, and many of them were recruited lawfully under the rules and qualifications valid at the time of their appointment.
The Minister pointed out that changing the rules after decades would cause serious problems.
He said,
“To now impose a new qualification decades later and retire them if they don’t qualify will cause massive disruption,”
The government has warned that the implementation of this judgment would lead to mass compulsory retirements.
This, they fear, will create a severe shortage of teachers across the state, affecting the education of lakhs of school children.
The Minister added,
“Recruiting or training an equivalent number of TET-qualified teachers in such a short time is practically impossible,”
The state’s legal argument is based on three important points. First, the Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009 sets minimum qualification standards only for new appointments and does not allow the removal of existing teachers.
Second, the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) Notification of 2010, which introduced TET, specifically exempted teachers who had already been appointed before that year.
Third, enforcing the qualification retrospectively will disturb the settled rights of lawfully appointed teachers and weaken the stability of schools.
This legal battle also comes just seven months before the Tamil Nadu assembly elections. Sending out a strong message of support to teachers, the government said it will not back down.
“We will fight vigorously in the Supreme Court to protect teachers’ livelihoods and ensure that the right of every child to quality education remains secure,” the Minister said.
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