On the occasion of National Teachers’ Day, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu will be conferring the National Teachers’ Awards at a function on September 5 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be interacting with the recipients on September 4.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has revised the guidelines for the selection of Teachers for National Awards (2017). According to a statement by the MHRD, “The new scheme should be transparent, fair, and reward demonstrated excellence and performance and has been inspired by recent innovations in major national awards.”
For the first time, teachers were allowed to apply directly nominate themselves for the award. 6,692 applications were received from teachers from all over the country for the awards.
As per the MHRD, all regular teachers will be eligible to apply and no minimum years of service is required which enabled meritorious young teachers to apply as well. Earlier, teachers with minimum 15 years of service were only eligible to apply for the awards.
The number of awards has been rationalized to 45 and the ministry said this has been necessary to restore the prestige of the awards (under the earlier scheme the number of awardees had crossed 300).
For the awards, every district selected the three best teachers and forwarded their names to the committee under the State/UT Secretary of Education who made a shortlist. A total of 152 nominations were finally received from all States, UTs and Organisations.
The final selection was done by an independent Jury. The criteria adopted was to select those teachers who had shown innovation in their work and had added value to the school and to their students.
