The support of the BJP to the Block Grant teachers’ stir has given a new dimension to their long struggle for job regularisation.
While Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has demanded that the Odisha Government needs to hike its budget allocation for education, Union Human Resources Minister Prakash Javedkar has expressed concern over the paltry payment made to vast sections of teaching community in Odisha in the form of Block Grant.
Notably, earlier, the agitators against Block Grant had never got the backing of any Opposition party.
Meanwhile, even as the Block Grant teachers and employees have been on indefinite dharana in the State capital and their institutions have been shut for the last six days, the Government appears to be unsteady over implementation of grant-in-aid (GIA), which would regularize their jobs.
The Block Grant row is nothing new and the agitation by the disgruntled teachers of thousands of schools and colleges has been on since long last. But every time, the Naveen Patnaik Government has tried to bypass the moot question of teachers’ disgruntlement. Sadly, though already 10 years have passed since the Block Grant was implemented in 2008, the Government is yet make up its mind on regularising the employees who have worked for the last 20-25 years either without any payment or at a paltry payment under the Block Grant.
Everyone now knows that it would not be feasible to regularise the jobs of about 50,000 staffers at a stroke, given the problem of funds, but had the Government shown the willpower and given due importance to the issue to sort it out, probably, the matter would not have worsened to such as extent.
On the contrary, the Naveen Patnaik Government has been very apathetic towards the issue.
Even it has gone to the extent of cheating and bluffing the teaching community, apart from the people of the State, by saying that it had scrapped the Block Grant and implemented GIA in its place.
The last GIA policy covering a large numbers of schools and colleges was framed by the late Biju Patnak Government in 1994. But the legendary Biju did not win the election to implement the policy. His successor, the Congress Government executed the policy. But the financial burden on the exchequer was so big that the Congress Government later did not extend the policy for the institutions set up after 1989.
The policy was almost in limbo till 2008, when the BJD Government started the Block Grant policy. But between 2008 and till date, it has not shown any sincerity to extend the GIA policy even though there has been a long agitation against it.