We’re not beggars sitting here for days; rather, it is

you (MlAs, Ministers) who are! You beg us for votes, but once your mission achieved, you go damn selfish,“ said a Block Grant (BG) teacher while addressing colleagues at the Mahatma Gandhi Road here.

The United Forum of School and College Teachers has been taking to streets for over a couple of weeks now, again reiterating its demands for grant in aid (GIA) or in other words, regularisation of jobs.

While the teachers took out a rally from the Master Canteen on August 16, I, like hundreds others, was struggling to get out of a traffic mess.

Thousands of teachers and employees on the day started off from the railway station and it took almost more than an hour to move past just the Master Canteen square. I was coming from the Sriya Talkies Square and found the traffic almost in comma. With a lot of difficulties, I managed to come up to the lalchand Jewellers and had to stop there.

To be a little smart, I thought I might avoid Master Canteen Square by talking a left turn towards the railway station and picking up the road I can join the other end of Master Canteen, my destination being Bapuji Nagar.

But that was a mistake as that road too was jam-packed with vehicles stranded back to back. To add to the trouble, it began to rain.

So I had little option than to park the bike by the road and rushed into a makeshift shop with a tarpaulin roof to take refuge. I found like me everyone else standing there grimacing at the agitators as well as the Government. “No end to the teachers-Government face-off,” opined one, adding “It is common public which has to suffer.”

I thought why commuters alone, lakhs suffer when people come out for rally over an issue. If my memory does not fail, I remember, none else than Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had declared last year that the Block Grant was abolished and teachers to get GIA from January 1, 2018. Every one hoped the issue was settled once and for all.

Education Minister Badri Patra had heaped praises on the CM and described the step as ‘historic’. But one is befuddled, why then the teachers are again squatting on the street.

One agitator from Jajpur told me at the MG Road on the 15th day of their stir, “The CM has bluffed. He’s not like his father, former CM Biju Patnaik, who was forthright and meant what he said,” adding, “ We’ll keep sitting here days and nights, eat here, sleep here, urinate here, relieve of us here, till our demands are met.”