At a time when the State Government is attacked over the chit fund scam, the high school teachers’ agitation only scratched its wounds with the result that the teachers faced the worst.
School and Mass Education (SME) Secretary Usha Padhee acted tough on the striking teachers by asking the authorities to cut their salary for unauthorised absence for the period they were off school to participate in a massive rally before the Assembly on Monday last.
The SME Department justified the step saying that since it is a peak time for the students who will appear the HSE examination in February next year, the teachers need to be present in schools and finish lessons.
But while preaching the sermon, the Government is deliberately trying to evade the issue of the bread and butter problem of the teachers in the Block Grant schools. When the teachers are not provided their due salary and benefits how the Government expects proper work from them is best known to it.
The whole idea is the scam-tainted State Government is also an exploitative master. For the long cry of thousands of Block Grant school and college teachers for grant-in-aid (GIA) has failed to move it for years.
These teachers have had to work without payment for a large part of their service period till the Naveen Patnaik Government woke up to their plight and provide a rare and unheard-of payment in the State’s history called Block Grant during the fag end of its second stint under poll compulsions. But it was a precarious scale of pay-- paltry and irregular. The teachers who failed to arrange two squares meals for their family took to the streets and demanded GIA. They raved and ranted; long years went by; but the Government was still casting a deaf ear. It was revised before the last elections again with a view to get vote. The teachers demanded GIA, the Government declared it was giving GIA, but when the shape of the grant was clear it was found to be the same Block Grant.
The State Government has driven thousands of teachers, employees and their family members to the edge by keeping them starving. The exploitation of these hapless teachers has gone far too long yet there is no way for them to escape from it. In the last many years, they have held large demonstrations and been thrashed by the police many a time, yet they are forced to work for a peanut. These teachers have no service conditions, DA and other facilities available to the Government employees.