Agartala: In Tripura, a government campaign to mark Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday has entered places where politics is not supposed to be the primary business: classrooms, Anganwadi centres, ration shops, Panchayat offices and public health facilities.

The month-long “Seva Sankalp Abhiyan” announced by Chief Minister Manik Saha on September 14 has put the state administration behind programmes celebrating Modi’s 25 years in public life. Across 4,945 schools, children are to take part in drawing and speech competitions linked to the theme, while 10,479 Anganwadi centres have been brought into the campaign and more than six lakh diyas (earthen lamps) are being distributed through fair-price shops, Panchayat offices and Arogya Mandirs.

The campaign, which began on September 17 and will continue until October 17, is not being run solely through the BJP’s organisational network. State finance minister Pranajit Singha Roy has been made the nodal minister, guardian ministers have been assigned districts and senior government officials, including district magistrates, have been brought into the administrative structure overseeing the programme. The information and cultural affairs department is the nodal department.

At several district-level events, government releases have featured BJP functionaries on stage alongside ministers and district officials, in some cases identifying the party figures as “social workers” rather than by their political affiliation.

8,000 posts vacant, but teachers told to light diyas

On September 16, the West Tripura district education administration issued a memorandum instructing 71 schools to send 1,358 teachers to Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala to participate in the diya-lighting programme marking the launch of the birthday campaign.

Speaking to The Wire, school administrators acknowledged the memorandum and pointed out that the events fell outside classroom hours.

“According to the instructions given to us by the District Education office, our teachers attended. As for whether it was mandatory, it was sort of like that. But it was held after school hours,” said Dr Nirmal Kanti Kar, Principal of Pallimangal Higher Secondary School, which was instructed to depute 25 teachers to Ujjayanta Palace.

“Their only activity was to attend the lamp-lighting programme. Since he is the prime minister of our country, I do not see the politics in this. They can attend such a programme,” he added.

Rajib Sinha, a Post Graduate Teacher (PGT) from the school who attended the event, said, “The event was for lighting earthen lamps on the occasion of Narendra Modi’s birthday. Our main task there was simply lighting the lamps,” Sinha said.

“There was a huge crowd where speeches were being delivered, so we could not go there,” he added.

BJP National General Secretary and Lok Sabha MP Biplab Kumar Deb lighting a lamp at Ujjayanta Palace in Agartala on September 17 with party colleagues, including state general secretary Chandan Debnath, MLA Dipak Majumder, Minister Tinku Roy, and acting Zilla Sabhadhipati Biswajit Shil, during events marking Modi’s birthday month. Photo: Social media.

The mobilisation comes against a persistent shortage of teachers in the state’s schools. The latest UDISE data puts the number of single-teacher schools in Tripura at 376 for 2025-26. A NITI Aayog report, drawing on 2025-26 Project Approval Board data, records 8,020 vacant teaching posts, including 6,006 at the elementary level, 843 at the secondary level and 1,171 at the senior-secondary level. The same report records 340 single-teacher schools using the earlier 2024-25 UDISE dataset.

These severe shortages have repeatedly pushed desperate students and parents onto the streets. Just days before the government campaign began, on September 14, students of West Rajnagar English Medium School in Khowai blocked a major road because only three teachers were available for all nursery and primary classes.

The breaking points are stark across other districts as well. At Dhan Singh Choudhury Memorial School, just four teachers were left to manage nearly 400 students. At Sat Sangam High School, a single teacher was tasked with handling over 200 children in a morning section. At other institutions, students have protested over arbitrary teacher transfers or infrastructure so poor they are forced to sit on bare floors.

Even the government’s flagship ‘Vidyajyoti’ model schools are buckling........

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