UP teacher suspended after DM checks his phone, discovers he played Candy Crush, used social media during duty hours

Uttar Pradesh news: A government school teacher in the Sambhal district of Uttar Pradesh was suspended for misconduct during duty hours. The teacher, Priyam Goyal, was found playing Candy Crush, using social media, and talking on his mobile phone during school hours.

During a surprise inspection, District Magistrate Rajendra Pansiya discovered numerous errors in students' notebooks. While checking the notebooks of six students, Pansiya found 95 mistakes, nine of which were on the first page itself.

The device's Digital Well-being feature revealed that assistant teacher Priyam Goyal had spent nearly two hours playing Candy Crush and 56 minutes on phone calls and social media apps during school hours.

The Digital Well-being feature tracks hours dedicated to applications.

This case concerns the Sambhal Development Block's Sharifpur primary school.

The District Magistrate expressed disappointment, emphasising the importance of teachers focusing on students' education rather than personal activities during school hours.

“Teachers should focus on checking the classwork and homework of students and ensure that they get quality education. Also, using mobile phones is not a problem, but using them for personal reasons during school hours is not right,” the District Magistrate told reporters.

Later, the state education department took cognisance of the matter and suspended Goyal.

A user's post on social media platform X, expressing concern about the Uttar Pradesh education department’s order, attracted several comments.

Some users said the UP government school should have terminated him from the job, while others raised questions about whether a District Magistrate was authorised to check a government employee’s mobile phone.

In another incident, a teacher of a coaching centre was knifed to death allegedly by one of his students inside a classroom in Assam’s Sivsagar district on Saturday.

The student, who is a minor, has been taken to the local police station in Sivsagar town.