India. Rajasthan adopts new strategy in teacher training

In the State of Rajasthan, there are about 100,000 teachers working in remote places. Training this large number of teachers in population education is always tedious, time consuming and expensive. To be able to reach and train these teachers working in primary schools without extra effort, time and money, the State Institute of Educational Research and Training (SIERT) adopted a new approach for this purpose. The approach makes use of the block level administrative approach in Rajasthan, where the monthly pay is distributed at various pay centers in the block. Every month, about 50-60 teachers gather at each pay center to collect their salaries. These teachers also take this opportunity to spend some time to learn new academic information and solve their problems. The SIERT took this opportunity of group meetings by presenting lectures or talks on population education to these teachers. Experts were invited from the District Institute of Education and Training to give lectures on various topics such as concepts and needs for population education; teaching, strategies and organization of co-curricular activities and discussion on the textual material in the Hindi language and environmental education for primary school students. So far, these talks had been arranged at 150 pay centers covering around 7500 teachers in the year 1993.