JKCCTA holds protest, seeks immediate fulfilment of demands

College contractual teachers during a protest in Srinagar. -Excelsior/Shakeel
College contractual teachers during a protest in Srinagar. -Excelsior/Shakeel

Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, Apr 17: The Jammu and Kashmir College Contractual Teachers Association (JKCCTA) today held a protest demonstration raising their long pending issues.
Several members of the JKCCTA appeared in the Press Enclave and raised slogans in favour of their demands. Waheed Ahmad Ganie Vice President JKCCTA, Dr Mohammad Iqbal Rather, Chief Spokesperson JKCCTA were leading the protest.
They said that the college contractual teachers are working on an academic arrangement basis in different colleges of the Kashmir Division for the last 20 years.
They said that the faculty working on an academic arrangement basis have been subjected to the utmost humiliation by the Higher Education Department of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir now Union Territory.
“It is the academic arrangement faculty working in the different colleges of the Jammu and Kashmir UT who have kept skeletal of higher education alive from decades,” they said.
The exclusion of Academic Arrangement from “Civil Services Special Provisions Act, 2010,” they said, aggravated the faculty and after witnessing the humiliation and sense of job insecurity some of the faculty members knocked on the doors of the judiciary in 2014 and zero attention of the authorities towards their grievances extended the number to thousands.
The High Court asked for an affidavit from the Department of Higher Education to confirm their stand towards the court cases.
“In their response, the Director Colleges along with all the Principals of the Degree Colleges submitted an affidavit mentioning that they have not disturbed the position of the petitioners and are maintaining their Status Quo. But in reality, they have made the contempt of the court,” they said.
They said that the Principals are not allowing them to work and not entertained their presence in the colleges and harassed them by mentioning that they have verbal orders from the Director Colleges to not allow the contractual faculty to resume their duties and force them to work as guest lecturers which resulted in the utmost humiliation and harassment of the faculty.
At this point the Nodal Principal Kashmir Division while sending the new academic arrangement faculty to the different colleges of Kashmir Division is directly hitting the faculty working on court orders and are replacing them with the same set of arrangement which is contrary to the directions of the supreme court of India.
The teachers appealed to LG Manoj Sinha, LG’s Advisor to Higher Education Rajiv Rai Bhatnagar, Secretary Higher Education Sushma Chauhan, Chief Justice of J&K High Court, to intervene in this matter personally.