TET Exemption Debate

Teachers deserve fairness, not just rules

Dr S Bashir Ahmad Veeri

drveeri2@gmail.com

The demand from the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly to exempt teachers appointed before 1 January 2019 from the Teacher Eligibility Test has brought an emotional and genuinely important issue into public view. At its heart, this is not merely a legal or administrative matter. It is about how a nation treats the men and women who have spent years, often decades, standing in front of classrooms, shaping young minds with limited resources and, in many cases, very little recognition.

Since the demand has come through a political resolution, a fair question naturally arises. Should decisions about teacher eligibility and classroom standards be shaped by political bodies at all, or should they be left entirely to educationists, regulators and the judiciary? Education, many argue, works best when it is kept away from political pressure, because policies that shift with every change in government or every election cycle can hurt the long term interests of children and teachers alike. This is a reasonable concern and it deserves honest attention, not dismissal.

At the same time, it would be too simple to say that elected representatives have no role in education. A legislature raising the genuine hardship of thousands of serving teachers is not necessarily political interference in the harmful sense. It becomes interference only when such demands are used to bypass established law, weaken academic standards or serve narrow short term interests rather than the wellbeing of students and teachers. The real safeguard is not to remove elected voices from the conversation completely, but to ensure that final decisions on standards like TET remain firmly anchored in the Constitution, the RTE Act and the guidance of professional education bodies, rather than in political convenience.

The Supreme Court has made its own position clear, and its judgments offer a useful example of how this balance can work. In its judgment of 1 September 2025, the Court held that TET is a mandatory requirement under the Right to Education Act, connecting it to the constitutional promise of quality education for every child under Article 21A. Later, on 29 May 2026, while rejecting review petitions, the Court extended the compliance period from two years to three years, until 31 August 2028, and asked authorities to hold TET twice a year wherever possible. This shows that the judiciary, not political pressure, remains the final word on how the law should be applied, even while showing sensitivity to the practical situation of teachers.

It is worth remembering the peculiar situation of Jammu and Kashmir here. The RTE Act did not apply there until the Reorganisation Act of 2019 brought it into force. Teachers who joined service before that date were selected under rules that simply did not include TET. They did not skip a requirement out of negligence. The requirement was not part of their world when they were appointed. Many of these teachers have now given ten, fifteen, even twenty years of honest service. Treating them the same way as a fresh recruit who never faced any such test at all would not be fair to their years of dedication and hard work.

At the same time, nobody can deny that quality education for children must remain the top priority. A test like TET exists for good reason, to ensure a common minimum standard across a large and diverse teaching workforce. The answer, therefore, is not to throw away the requirement because of political demand, nor to apply it in a rigid manner without any consideration for context. A middle path, decided on sound educational reasoning and not on political calculation, is what is truly needed.

This is where continuous training and self improvement become so important. Teaching is not a skill that gets fixed forever after one examination. Good teachers keep learning throughout their working life, through workshops, refresher courses, exposure to new methods and honest self reflection on their own classroom practice. India already has useful experience here. The National Education Policy 2020 recommends that every teacher undergo at least fifty hours of Continuous Professional Development each year, delivered through platforms like NISHTHA. Singapore offers a similar lesson, where teachers complete around one hundred hours of professional development annually as part of keeping their profession strong.

For Jammu and Kashmir, and for India as a whole, the way forward should rest on such evidence based frameworks, guided by educationists and constitutional courts, even as political voices are heard with respect. This would keep education free from harmful interference while still ensuring that the legitimate concerns of serving teachers are not ignored. Both the child's right to quality education and the teacher's right to dignity after years of honest service can then be protected together, within a system built on standards rather than sentiment or politics.

(The author is a legislator from South Kashmir)