The Supreme Court has issued notice to the Centre and states on a petition seeking a direction to formulate a comprehensive policy and appropriate statutory framework for ensuring the welfare, social security and post-retirement protection of lakhs of private school teachers across India.A Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta on Thursday asked the Centre and states to respond to the PIL filed by All India Teachers Federation National Coordinator Ligimol George and posted the matter for hearing after four weeks.Contending that private schoolteachers constituted a substantial and indispensable component of the nation’s educational workforce, the petitioner submitted that millions of private school teachers serving in recognised private educational institutions were deprived of a comprehensive, uniform and effective statutory welfare framework.The private school teachers were suffering despite discharging the vital public function of imparting education and contributing to the realisation of the constitutional mandate under Article 21A (Right to Education) of the Constitution, the PIL submitted.Highlighting that legislative and policy vacuum has resulted in arbitrary disparities between teachers performing substantially identical educational functions, it demanded that a National Private School Teachers Welfare Board or a similar institutional mechanism should be established to coordinate and monitor welfare measures across India.The petitioner pointed out that the existing laws such as the Employees’ State Insurance Act, Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, Payment of Gratuity Act and the Code on Social Security, 2020 provided only limited or fragmented protection to private school teachers, depending on eligibility requirements and state-specific regulations.Citing the data published by the Ministry of Education under the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+), the PIL stated the UDISE+ 2023–24 report recorded that India has approximately 14.72 lakh schools, over 98 lakh teachers and nearly 24.8 crore students.“Significantly, 37,30,047 teachers are employed in recognised private unaided schools alone, constituting a substantial segment of the national teaching workforce,” it submitted.Many of them worked in private schools on contractual, temporary, ad hoc, fixed-pay or annually renewable appointments and retired without any assured pension, adequate medical assistance, insurance, disability protection or other post-retirement benefits, the petitioner said, adding the absence of uniform welfare protection has led to unequal treatment of teachers performing substantially similar functions across states and institutions.