Surat: The first word in the suicide note of 53-year-old Shankar Jadav, a primary school principal, is ‘online work’. Online and paperless technology has been introduced in offices to reduce workload and improve productivity. But in Kaprada of Valsad, it becomes several times more stressful. For every online task, one has to climb a hill or go to a place sometimes kilometres away where network is available. In the case of Jadav, at his village Divsi and in the school where he worked at Niloshi, getting a mobile network in both places is a challenge.Jadav was basically a teacher; his day started with taking online attendance of his class, then, as head teacher, putting up data and bills of work done in school on an online portal and then filing data online for census duties. If all was over, then came election data to feed online as a BLO.“He had to go to nearby Lavkar village around five km away many times to finish online filing work for election duties or census-related work. He went to any known person’s home or sat outside a shop,” said Vipul, nephew of Jadav. In the suicide note, Jadav named Vipul to take care of his family. Vipul was close to Jadav’s heart and always took him along when going outstation. Vipul claims that there were serious network issues in Divsi and Niloshi due to which Jadav was stressed.Not only the family but even teachers from Kaprada have been raising concerns over the work pressure and methods adopted, but the issues were never resolved.“We were supposed to attend 50 hours online mandatory training for which even a person attends two hours daily one has to sit idle at a place like hill or some open space where network is available. In several Kaprada villages network is not available and primary schools do not have computers with internet,” said Anand Patel, secretary, Kaprada Taluka Prathmik Shikshak Sangh.Jadav’s colleagues and teachers from the district explain that, from attendance to submission of marks for each question separately, everything is online. Recently, principals submitted 74 types of details of each student for a state govt portal and later, after two months, the same details were asked for a central govt portal, said a teacher. For scholarship, the school is supposed to submit details on another portal.A day before his suicide on Tuesday, Jadav attended training to submit bills for infrastructure work done in school. In the new system, the school is supposed to submit an advance bill online and complete a lengthy process. Later, the school is supposed to take out seven copies of the papers and submit six of them to District Panchayat 75 km away.“Network is not only concern, many times the server of the portals are also down. So when will a teacher teach student,” said Patel.“There are serious network issues in Kaprada and it adds to the severe stress of teachers who are already overburdened with various type of work. Along with teaching the teachers are assigned census, election and other duties,” said Jayesh Garasiya, President of Valsad District Primary Teachers Association.Villagers have raised concerns about the network issues many times in the past, but the online tasks increase without network. Aruna Gamit, sarpanch of Divsi, and her husband Dinesh, a community leader, have requested to find out a solution for mobile network, but the issue is not addressed. “Jadav was a gem of a person and idol for the village. But network issues created major trouble for him and he was worried about it,” said Dinesh.
