A primary school teacher from Jalgaon district committed suicide, allegedly because of the increasing workload, particularly the numerous online updates he was forced to make about the students' performance
A primary school teacher from Jalgaon district committed suicide, allegedly because of the increasing workload, particularly the numerous online updates he was forced to make about the students' performance.
Aabasaheb Chaudhary
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Aabasaheb Chaudhary, 45, a teacher at the Deshmukhwadi Zilla Parishad school in Pimpalwad Mhalsa, was found hanging at a local onion farm at 6.40 am yesterday. It was the owner of the farm, Gangaram Chaudhary, who found the body in the morning.
Suicide note
A suicide note found in Aabasaheb's pocket stated that he took the step out of frustration with the increasing workload that the state had dumped on teachers.
An officer from the Mehunbare police station said, "He wrote that he took this step after getting frustrated with online work, and that nobody should be held responsible. We registered an accidental death report."
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Aabasaheb's suicide struck a chord in the education circles. A local teacher said, "The state has loaded school teachers with immense extra-curricular work. It started with the management of mid-day meals, and now includes continuous updates on different websites."
"We already had to update the state's SARAL website. Now the central government is also introducing the Shagun website, where we have to fill in school and students' data all over again. In smaller localities, the entire responsibility falls on a single teacher active in the school. Most teachers in the interiors are overburdened with such work," the teacher added.
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Official speak
Nand Kumar, secretary of the state's school education department, said, "It is an unfortunate incident. The online processes were introduced to make it convenient for teachers, as well as to build a centralised database for all government schools. Those teachers who are not familiar with technology or have other issues can certainly submit the data offline to our data entry operator at different block levels of each district government office. These operators can further feed the data into the online system. It appears that all teachers are not aware of this option. I will have to verify the details of this case."
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