The rebellious show of angst by the land’s soldiers staged in the year 1857 against their British lords ruling over the country, made known by the historians as Sepoy Mutiny has acquired a patriotic colour with the event being currently described as the First War of Independence. While the countless mass of activists who took part in the subsequent long-drawn show of demanding freedom from colonial rule ending on the midnight of Aug. 14-15, 1947 comprised a large presence of teachers and also a not-exactly-estimated number of activists of other diverse professions such as legal practice, the spotlight turned on the set of well-marked orators like Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal (the famed Lal-Bal-Pal trio) as well as heroic martyrs like Sangolli Rayanna, Madan Lal Dhingra, Rajguru, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagat Singh as well as women-warriors like Kittor Rani Chennamma and Jhansi Lakshmibai seems to have not bestowed the adulation due to teachers as a distinct class. The image of teachers in contemporary society is a mixed bag of veiled appreciation as well as subdued adoration for some and disrespect for the rest, despite the time-honoured culture of likening one’s teacher to God by the expression Guru Devo Bhava.

The often less noticed high proportion of school-bound children’s population in the country’s total headcount as well as the virtual army of their teachers, such as about four lakh in Karnataka are together both voiceless and neglected in public space across the country, despite grandiose celebrations of Children’s Day (Nov. 14) and Teachers’ Day (Sept. 5) every year.

Issues of children’s welfare and moulding them into ideal citizens of next generation have been left in the care of exclusive Ministries of Child Welfare both at the Centre and in the States across the country while the cause of teachers appears to have got relegated to a significant extent, the matter being clouded in the wide ambit of the Ministry of Human Resources in the Union Government. Teachers, as an honourable slice of society, are touted for pursuing a noble profession and, therefore, immune from resorting to any kind of agitation against the administration of the day, lest their wards get the wrong message of emulating them in later life.

To make a long story short, the only God-Father for the hapless teachers, stuck in their thankless job, are their elected representatives in the Legislature, namely the Legislative Council. The teacher fraternity bugged by a plethora of travails occasionally give vent to their pleas for resolving their problems. Needless to say that keeping the land’s teachers in a zone of life’s comfort is the best service society can offer to its children.