Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU Aug 24: Castigating the State Government for turning a deaf ear to the repeated representations of School, College and Polytechnic lecturers for redressal of their genuine grievances, party activists, led by Harsh Dev Singh, Chairman JKNPP and former Education Minister, staged a protest demonstration seeking their salary enhancement and regularization of services.
Terming the exploitation of educated and other unemployed youth of the State as worst form of human rights violation, Mr Singh said that the fast swelling number of highly qualified educated unemployed youth in the State were treated like bonded labourers. Expressing solidarity with the cause of the College, School and Polytechnic lecturers engaged on contract / academic arrangement basis and who included Ph Ds M Phils, Double post graduates etc, he regretted that such highly qualified youth were being paid Rs 7,000/- per month in Higher Secondary Schools and Polytechnics where as Rs 8,000/- in colleges which had not been revised for the last more than 12 years. He regretted that while the MLAs voted themselves a whopping salary of Rs 1.60 lakh in the recently concluded session of the Legislative Assembly, none of them bothered to rake up the issue of these highly qualified who were being paid less than a Class-IV employee despite holding doctorate and even post doctorate degrees.
Seeking intervention of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti into the grave issue, Mr Singh advocated for enhancement in the honorarium of all such the contractual/ academic arrangement lecturers who were being made to work for paltry salary as against around Rs 45,000/- being paid to a regular lecturer and demanded hike in the emoluments to at least Rs 20,000/- as the existing rates had not been revised since 2004. He said that several lecturers engaged on academic arrangement in hilly and remote areas had shown reluctance to join services in view of negligible emoluments offered to them with the result that the majority of educational institutions including Schools, Colleges and Polytechnics had become defunct and staff deficient.
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