In our view, the Online Teacher Transfer initiative under the Saksham Education programme of the Government of Haryana witnessed a shift from being ‘Comatose’ with low ‘political salience’ and low ‘system capacity’ to ‘Battle Ready’ with high ‘political salience’ and high ‘system capacity’.

The online teacher transfer initiative aimed to streamline the teacher transfer process in the state of Haryana to make it transparent, merit-driven and demand-based.

On the political salience front, a new policy was formulated and put in place to ensure equitable, merit-based allocation of teachers while balancing their preferences with demand across zones. Grievances of departmental stakeholders and teacher unions were redressed directly by the Chief Minister, building top-down political will on enabling online teacher transfers.

System capacity –that is, people, process and infrastructure– grew almost hand-in-hand with political salience. On the people front there was a robust bureaucratic and administrative cadre already in place. Additionally, a special legal team was set up headed by the district attorney to manage litigation action against the department and ensure its strong representation. On the process front data collection, cleaning, and updation exercises were conducted at the student, school and employee levels to create a point system that enabled data-backed decision-making which accounted for teacher preferences. Furthermore, reviews were enabled at all levels to ensure alignment of stakeholders involved in the process, with daily scrum meetings being conducted to ensure smooth execution. On the infrastructure front, technological infrastructure was built in the form of an online HR management system set up to enable teacher preference collection and implement rule-based assignments across the state.

With this, the state of Haryana was able to significantly curb the vacancy of teachers in historically vacant zones, with 94% of science stream schools being fully staffed, and reduced the time taken to conduct the whole exercise by 67% which allowed over 90,000 transfers being enabled over 3 years.