For close to two hours, Mohammed Jasimuddin paces — up and down the room, between benches, in the aisle between desks. “That’s the only way I can be heard in a class of 85,” says Mohammed Jasimuddin, 34, a contract teacher of social studies at the Rajkiyakrita Madhya Vidyalaya at the sub-division town of Tarapur in Bihar’s Munger district. All this while, Jasimuddin reads out from the Class VIII history textbook, the page open to the chapter ‘Angrezi shasan aur shahri badlav (British rule and urban change)’. There is a muffled drone in the background as students, five squeezed into each bench, struggle to keep up with the teacher, their textbooks overlapping each other’s. It’s 10 on a Wednesday morning and 85 students of Class VIII — of the 172 on the rolls — have come together in a 20×50 ft room. These students are from two sections and like on most days, it’s a combined class because the school (with classes from I to VIII) has only 10 teachers for 665 students. But not all the teachers are free to teach — on any given day, someone is engaged in the monitoring of the midday meal scheme while three-four teachers double as booth-level officers, with mandatory additional work such as election and census duties. - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/big-picture-i-have-to-shout-to-be-heard-it-has-become-a-habit/#sthash.7DnejzaC.dpuf