Avoid fashionable clothes, schoolteachers told

Bhanu P Lohumi

Tribune News Service

Shimla, June 26

With a spurt in the incidents of sexual abuse and molestation in educational institutions and cases under the POCSO Act, the Department of Higher Education has asked school and college teachers to avoid wearing fashionable clothes.

“Parents and teachers play an important role in a student’s life. It is important that teachers adopt a descent dressing style and maintain good conduct to have a positive impact on students,” said Director, Higher Education, Amarjeet Kumar Sharma.

Education Minister Suresh Bhardwaj said teachers of Senior Secondary School, Dhundhan (Solan), had fixed a dress code. “We expect other schools too to follow the same. We will soon hold talks with teachers in this regard”, said the minister.

In August 2017, the then Chief Secretary VC Pharkha had issued an advisory to all government departments asking them to ensure that officials, employees and other staff members are properly dressed. It came in the wake of the High Court reprimand to a junior engineer who had appeared for an hearing in jeans and a colourful check shirt.

The advisory had stated that government servants should come dressed in formals and sober colours. Party attire should be avoided during duty hours. The Education Department is now mulling starting training sessions for both students and teachers on behavioural and psychological conduct, besides upgrading their knowledge.

The Director, Higher Education, said since there were multiple entry points for the recruitment of teachers, maintaining quality of teaching had become a major challenge. He said the number of institutions had witnessed an increase over the years and it was not feasible to monitor activities in all schools.

Earlier, the department had directed the heads of all institutions to take immediate action in accordance with the provisions of the POCSO Act and cautioned that an attempt to hush up any matter would attract criminal and departmental action.

Sources said a sudden increase in the cases of sexual abuse was due to the lack of teacher-student bond, degrading moral values, lack of parental control and an easy excess to the Internet.