DW BUREAU / Chandigarh Haryana Chief Minister, Sh. Manohar Lal has termed the reports regarding the closure of schools and vacant posts of teachers as misleading and baseless. Addressing a press conference held here today, the Chief Minister said that the State Government will neither close any school nor there are many posts of teachers are vacant. The state is in process of recruiting 11,000 teachers, of which 5000 PGTs will be recruited by HPSC and 6000 TGTs will be recruited by HSSC. Till permanent recruitment is made, possibilities are explored to fill these posts through Kaushal Rozgar Nigam, added Sh. Manohar Lal. He said that in the last eight years, 8,600 PGTs and TGTs have been recruited. Referring to the issue of PRT teachers which is sub-judicious in the Supreme Court, the Chief Minister said that the government stands with those teachers. He said that all these teachers are well qualified and the government can even consider recruiting such teachers in the new recruitment process. These teachers had cleared the HTET exam after the posts were advertised, due to which their appointment was questioned, said Sh. Manohar Lal. The Chief Minister said that due to COVID-19 Pandemic, the-teachers of online transfer of teachers was halted. During this many teachers retired and many got promoted. Now, the state government has again started the transfer drive and I would like to share that more than 90 per cent of teachers are satisfied with the online transfer drive. When the work of the teacher's transfer policy halted in some schools, the number of teachers decreased as compared to the student strength, while in some schools the number of teachers was in excess compared to the student strength. Hence rationalization of teachers as per Teacher Student Ratio became mandatory, said Sh. Manohar Lal. "When we started the online transfer process again this year, we found that there were 117 government secondary schools that had no teachers and more than 2,000 PGTs were employed in such high schools where classes IX and X had only one or two sections. Therefore it was decided to rationalize the teachers according to the workload, "said Sh. Manohar Lal. Taking a dig at the Opposition for making noise over the merging of schools, the Chief Minister said that during the tenure of the previous government, 509 schools were merged, whereas during our tenure only 120 schools are merged. The Chief Minister said that after merging the number of senior secondary schools is 2304, high school is 1027, the middle is 2122, and primary is 4184. (editor@dailyworld.in)