When education has touched the lowest nadir in State with teachers facing a career crisis and cash-crunch schools and colleges getting shut down whimsically and resorting to illegal means to raise funds, the State Government has been for long sitting over a proposal to implement GIA by scraping the Block Grant.
The illegal means adopted by the Block Grant institutions is teachers helping students in malpractice during examinations and earning fast buck. Going by the recent trends of teachers having been arrested for such offence, it is now clear that all is not well in the education system in Odisha.
There is no denying the fact that the obduracy and lack of will power to put the fast deteriorating education sector back on track by the State Government has cost dear for millions of students, a majority of whom are from the rural and poor background.
Yet, despite having ruled the State for last 15 years, the longest ever period a party reigned in Odisha, the BJD Government and the Chief Minister look to be too elusive and nonchalant on the crucial issue.
leave aside the run-of-the mill approach of the Mass and Higher Education Ministers, the most unfortunate part is the Chief Minister has not minced a word on the issue so far, fuelling the doubt if he is at all aware of the crisis or feigning ignorance because he does not attach much importance to it and is trying to sweep it under the carpet.
The Chief Minister who is claiming to be a close adherent of Biju legacy and pro-poor must look into the fact that his is the Government that has broken tradition and veered history that his father and former Chief Minister Biju Patnaik so religiously followed. It is the BJD Government which coined the idea of Block Grant and launched the disgraceful salary system for thousands teachers in primary, middle, high schools, madrasas and colleges by sabotaging the long going precedent of Grant-In-Aid (GIA). Biju Patnaik had made the GIA policy respecting his predecessors in 1994 which was historic and covered the largest number of educational institutions in Odisha by way of regularising the services of the teaching and non-teaching staff in them. Biju ruled the State for not even a half of Naveen Patnaik, but he read the Odia nerve better than the present incumbent. While boldness, consistency and a human approach marked the style of functioning of Biju, Naveen seems to be the vice-versa.
For the last several years the State Government has been blowing hot and cold over scraping the Block Grant system and reintroducing the GIA. While it is assuring the teaching community of taking proactive steps on the one hand during the height of their agitation and frustration, on the other, it is dividing them to weaken their organisation and setting one against the other. Most painfully, it has been tactfully delaying a decision on the pretext of setting inter-Ministerial committees.
The Odisha teachers are the lowest paid community in the whole country under the Block Grant system. Besides, it keeps tormenting teachers by throwing him into the morass of uncertainty. When a large number of staff members are nearing their retirement age, asking them to wait for a decision on regularising their job is certainly a cruel joke. Most pertinently in the hide- and- seek game between the teachers not losing hope for GIA and an apathetic Government still not having made up its mind, the fate of lakhs of students hangs in balance amid regular disruptions in studies.