Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday tended to use a platform meant for honouring teachers to peddle her Government’s achievements but not before calling upon the students of her State to show respect to the teachers as “it is the teachers who build your future and impart values.”
Banerjee who was speaking at a programme organised on the eve of Teachers’ Day and attended among others by Vice Chancellors of Calcutta, Jadavpur and Presidency Universities said, “the teachers should be shown respect because if you do not show them respect today then time will not forgive you.”
Banerjee who tended to use the platform for rolling out inventory of her Government’s achievements and its wish list ahead of the Assembly elections scheduled to be held next year said, “like there is no alternative to a mother who gives birth there is no alternative to a teacher.”
The Chief Minister’s apparently mild admonition for a recent lot of belligerent students tended to come barely a day after a group of alleged Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad students hurled bombs and fired shots at Raiganj University campus, weeks after their Kolkata peers heckled professors of Calcutta University — much the way have allegedly been doing throughout the State for the past several years beating up principals and heckling Vice Chancellors.
Apparently, talking politics Banerjee used the platform to make a sarcastic reference of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachchh Bharat (Clean India) scheme saying the slogan was only a copy of her Nirmal Banlga programme. “Today people are doing advertisements for such schemes though we had initiated it much before,” she said reminding how three out of four top districts in Swachchh Bharat come from Bengal.
She claimed to have given 100 percent coverage to the schools under mid-day meal schemes. Insisting that her Government had 1,400 seats to the existing 1,300 ones in medical colleges she said during her regime 45 colleges and 14 universities and 67 model schools and polytechnic colleges had been set up making “Bengal an educational hub.”
In what was promptly dismissed by the State Opposition as a “political PR exercise ahead of the next year’s polls,” the Chief Minister promised cycles to 40 lakh poor students from class 9 to 12 besides declaring her Government had “registered 27 lakh girl students under the Kanyashree scheme.”
The programme which was also attended by India’s first transgender Principal Manobi Banerjee saw the Chief Minister vowing special schemes for the transgenders.