It may sound like a lofty claim. But my experience as a primary school teacher has taught me that teaching is not just another occupation. "A teacher’s engagement with education extends throughout the day and beyond — teaching in school and constantly learning outside it. But our education system seems to think otherwise,” laments Amlan Bishnu, a primary school teacher at Ghoshpur GSFP School in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas.

During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, Bishnu and three of his colleagues were assigned duties as booth-level officers (BLOs). Of the seven teachers in his school, four were away on BLO duty for nearly six months. “Imagine how the school functioned during that period, with only three teachers to take care of six classes. Ours was hardly an isolated case — about 70 per cent of primary school teachers were engaged in the SIR exercise,” says Bishnu.

His recent experience points to a deeper malaise in India’s elementary education. We worry about learning outcomes, revise curricula and talk about digital classrooms. Yet the very people expected to translate these aspirations into actual learning are routinely pulled out of classrooms for elections, electoral roll revisions, the Census and other administrative assignments. The schoolteacher has effectively become the State’s readily available reserve workforce.

The Calcutta High Court has now raised serious questions about this practice, reacting to a directive from West Bengal’s School Education Directorate (3 August 2026) that states: ‘Census work should be done in such a way that academic activities in the school are not affected. The teacher may perform Census activities post class hours or during the weekends.’

Justice Krishna Rao has asked: if teachers spend the day at school and then perform Census duty after school and even on Sundays, where is the time for rest, family and personal life?

Also Read: School or Census?: Calcutta HC questions teacher deployment, workload

And where, asks Archana Mondal, a primary school teacher in Cooch Behar’s Arambari Primary School No. III, is the time to........

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