Gujarat forms panel to cut teachers' non-academic work and data entry

Gujarat will set up a committee of senior officials to study how much non-academic work and online data entry the state's government school teachers are asked to do, and to suggest how to cut it. Education Minister Pradyuman Vaja announced the decision after a review meeting on Saturday, October 17, 2026. The state government will take a final decision on the basis of the committee's recommendations.

Ask a government school teacher in almost any state what takes time away from teaching, and the answer is rarely the syllabus. It is the paperwork: attendance and mid-day meal records uploaded to one portal, scholarship and student data to another, training modules to complete online, surveys to fill for other departments. Each task looks small. Together, teachers and their unions have long argued, they eat into the hours meant for children.

The law already draws a line. Section 27 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (the RTE Act) says no teacher shall be deployed for non-educational purposes other than the ten-yearly census, disaster relief, and duties connected with elections to local bodies, state assemblies and Parliament. In practice, policy researchers have pointed out, the line is blurred, because data entry and reporting are often treated as part of the job rather than as outside work, and because schools frequently have no clerical staff to do them.

Gujarat's move is part of a wider pattern. In recent weeks Haryana's Chief Secretary asked departments to identify their own staff who could take over non-teaching duties now handed to teachers, and Punjab's education minister has directed that any task beyond those permitted needs prior written approval from the Education Department. Courts have also stepped in: the Delhi High Court has asked the Election Commission to ensure that electoral roll revision work does not place an unbearable burden on school teachers.

What makes Gujarat's step notable is its focus on online data entry, not only on outside duties. Digital portals were introduced to track schools better, but when the same teacher has to feed several of them, the tool meant to improve learning can end up crowding it out. A committee that maps every portal and every request, and decides which ones are really needed, could lighten that load. Whether it does depends on what the committee recommends and on whether other departments agree to give up their claims on teachers' time.

Short-term: Nothing changes in schools yet. The committee has to be formed, study the duties teachers carry, and report to the government. Teachers and their associations are likely to press for their concerns to be heard during this review.

Long-term: If the government accepts the panel's advice, Gujarat could cut or merge the portals teachers must update, move some data work to other staff, and limit the duties other departments can assign to schools. That would give teachers more time in classrooms, which is the stated aim.

Who is affected: Teachers in Gujarat's government and grant-in-aid schools, the students they teach, the Education Department and its agencies such as GCERT and Samagra Shiksha, and the other departments that currently rely on teachers for surveys and data collection.

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