Teachers working in government-run and aided schools across Maharashtra have raised a serious complaint: their time for actual teaching is being severely eroded by a relentless demand to update student information on a plethora of online platforms. They state that the constant engagement with digital portals and apps, which now number a staggering 43, is diverting their focus from classroom instruction.
The Burden of Digital Data Entry
In a formal letter addressed to State Education Minister Dadaji Bhuse, the Maharashtra State Primary Teachers Association has highlighted this growing crisis. The letter, sent in late December 2025, points out that teachers initially adopted online educational tools voluntarily to enhance their teaching. However, the administration gradually made numerous school tasks compulsory on digital platforms like U-DISE and Shalarth.
Vijay Kombe, the state president of the association, explained that while online systems initially saved time on paperwork, the situation has now spiraled out of control. "There is now excessive demand for information through teachers’ personal mobile phones, with no clear limits," Kombe stated. The teachers have emphasized a critical systemic flaw: the absence of non-teaching staff in government schools. This means educators, who are already insufficient in number, are forced to handle all administrative and data-entry duties themselves.
Repetitive Tasks and Unjustified Mandates
The association's letter details several examples of unnecessary and duplicative work burdening teachers. One key issue is the demand for daily reporting of mid-day meal beneficiaries. While teachers have been sending daily SMS reports for years, they are now additionally required to enter the same data every day through the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) app's "Smart Attendance Maharashtra" chatbot.
Furthermore, teachers have questioned the logic behind enforcing online assessment under the Nipun Maharashtra program. They argue that student evaluation is already conducted through the National Achievement Survey (NAS) and Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) as mandated by the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Therefore, forcing them to use a reportedly flawed app developed by a private company for foundational literacy and numeracy verification is seen as unjustified.
Demands for Action and Threat of Boycott
The core grievance is that this additional digital workload, much of which involves repetition, is directly stealing time from the teaching-learning process. The teachers have demanded that the state government take concrete policy decisions to reduce this burden. Their protest comes just days after Education Minister Dadaji Bhuse himself wrote to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, seeking to exempt teachers from Block Level Officer (BLO) duties and other election-related work so they could focus on academics.
Frustrated by the lack of resolution, the teachers' association has issued a stern warning. If no corrective action is taken by the authorities, they have threatened to boycott all such non-teaching online tasks. This standoff underscores a significant tension in the digitization of education, where well-intentioned tools risk becoming counterproductive burdens on the very professionals they are meant to support.
