Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be honouring the recipients of the National Teachers’ Awards on September 4, (i.e the eve of National Teachers’ Day), and the Vice President will be conferring the awards on them at a function on September 5, that is Teachers’ Day.
This year’s awardees of National Teachers’ Awards are selected under revised guidelines to ensure transparent, fair and reward demonstrated excellence and performance.
This year, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has revised the guidelines for the selection of Teachers for National Awards (2017).
The basic premise now is that the new scheme should be transparent, fair, and reward demonstrated excellence and performance and has been inspired by recent innovations in major national awards.
The features of the new guidelines are as under:
i) From now onwards, all regular teachers will be eligible to apply and no minimum years of service are required. This has enabled meritorious young teachers to apply (under the earlier scheme, only teachers with minimum 15 years of service were eligible).
ii) For the first time, all teachers could directly apply and nominate themselves for the award (this feature did not exist in the earlier scheme).
iii) Self-nominations from teachers were invited online on mhrd.gov.in.The Web Portal was developed by the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) and the entire software ran smoothly without any glitches or complaints (it is for the first time that online applications have been invited for these awards).
iv) 6692 applications were received from teachers from all over the country clearly indicating that the initiative was successful.
v) The number of awards has been rationalised to 45. This has been necessary to restore the prestige of the awards (under the earlier scheme the number of awardees had crossed 300).
vi) Out of all the applications received, every district selected the 3 best teachers and forwarded these 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.
vii) The final selection was done by an independent Jury. The criterion adopted was to select those teachers who had shown innovation in their work and had added value to the school and to their students.
viii) These nominated teachers gave a presentation before an independent Jury comprising a senior educationist, during 3 rd week of August 2018. This ensured that all of them were given an opportunity to place before the jury their contribution and the work done by them.