Urdu Classrooms Still Waiting

Urdu Classrooms Still Waiting

Jameel Aahmed Milansaar  - Bangalore 

9845498354.

A cabinet decision is not a suggestion. When a government’s own cabinet commits to recruiting 800 Urdu-medium teachers in the first phase, the only honest next step is a notification that says 800. Anything less is not administration. It is erosion by arithmetic.

Yet that is exactly what Urdu-medium candidates in Karnataka are now bracing for. Word has travelled from some minority ministers that the forthcoming recruitment notification may carry only 530 Urdu-medium posts. Nothing official confirms it. But the rumour has landed on frightened ground, and the fear is not irrational. A number does not shrink in whispers unless someone is already measuring how much the community will tolerate.

Consider the context. The state is recruiting some 15,000 teachers across other subjects. Fifteen thousand posts move through the machinery without drama. Why, then, does a modest 800 for Urdu-medium schools need such delicate handling? Nobody has offered an answer, because there is no good one. Former Cabinet Minister Roshan Baig put the question to Chief Minister D K Shivakumar plainly during his recent meeting, and it deserves to be repeated plainly here: if the government can process fifteen thousand, what exactly makes eight hundred complicated?

Urdu-medium schools exist across the state. They are not museum pieces. Children sit in those classrooms today, and many sit in front of too few teachers. A school without enough teachers does not fail loudly. It fails quietly, one unfilled period at a time, until a generation has been taught less than it was owed. Shrinking the number of posts does not make that shortage disappear. It guarantees it.

Baig made the point that matters most: a teaching post is not merely a salary. It sustains a household, educates its children, and shapes what the next generation can hope for. Behind each of the 800 posts is a qualified candidate who has prepared, waited, and trusted that a cabinet decision means what it says. Cut the number to 530 and 270 of those people are told, without ceremony, that their preparation counted for nothing.

The Chief Minister has promised to instruct the concerned officials and to speak to Reshmi Mahesh, Additional Chief Secretary for Education. That is a welcome reply, and it is only a reply. Assurances are cheap. Notifications are binding. The community has heard sympathetic words before. What matters is the document that turns sympathy into appointments.

So the test is simple, and its deadline is the notification itself. If it carries 800 Urdu-medium posts, the government has honoured its own decision. If it carries 530, no explanation will rescue it, because the cabinet already settled the figure. Reopening a settled decision through a drafting choice is not prudence. It is a quiet reversal dressed as procedure.

Candidates should not be asked to feel grateful for the difference. They should not be told that 530 is better than nothing. The standard is not nothing. The standard is what the government itself decided.

Eight hundred posts is not a favour to Urdu speakers. It is a promise already made, a need already documented, and a classroom already waiting. Mr Shivakumar has the authority to make the notification match the decision, and he has been asked directly. The only acceptable answer will arrive in print, with the number 800 on it. Until it does, every day of delay leaves those classrooms short of teachers, and the government that allowed it will own that too.