Teacher course seats in heavy demand

HYDERABAD: While many seats in colleges offering professional courses like engineering, MCA, MBA and pharmacy seats have remained vacant in thousands in the state, the two-year TTC (Teacher Training Course) seats in management quota are being sold like hot cakes and at a premium.As many as 1.90 lakh students qualified in this year’s DIETCET-2011 entrance examination for 12,000 seats in management and convener quota put together.The department of school education has called only the first 50,000 eligible rankers to attend the counselling which was scheduled to be held from September 26 but postponed indefinitely due to the Sakala Janula Samme.According to information, the state has 12,000 TTC seats in private and government colleges put together.Each college has 50 seats, of which 10 are in the management quota.While the fees for a convener quota seat in government and private colleges are `2,385 and `12,500 respectively, a management quota seat commands a price of over `2 lakh for the two-year course.The price of a management quota seat has risen manifold in the last couple of years following certain decisions taken by the state government.Last year the government decided to recruit only TTC (D.Ed) qualifiers to SGT (Secondary Grade Teacher) posts in government schools.Earlier, B.Ed graduates had also been considered for the SGT posts but were restricted to school assistant posts.The price of a management seat rose to `50,000 last year when the state government, following a Supreme Court direction, reserved 70 per cent of SGT posts in 2008 DSC selections for TTC candidates.Within a few months, the government issued another GO stating that only TTC candidates would be eligible for all the SGT posts for the DSC selections thereafter.The present academic year is the first year after the latest decision and a management quota seat price zoomed to `2 lakh.Speaking to Express, a teacher from Nalgonda district said that he had approached colleges in Nakrekal and Suryapet in the district seeking admission for his wife to the TTC course and the managements demanded `1.70 lakh as fee for two years.Shocked, he approached some colleges near Hyderabad which were collecting `2 lakh for the course. When he went back to the Nakrekal and Suryapet colleges he was greeted with the answer that the seats had been ‘sold out’.That was not the only case.Many colleges are demanding Rs 2 lakh for the two-year course with the government deciding to recruit only TTC candidates to SGT posts.The recent government’s announcement of recruiting 50,000 teachers in the next few months further emboldened the managements to increase the fee and yet the demand has not gone down a wee bit.