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Blame it on the Hype
Imagine a student bumping into his/her teacher begging for alms on a busy thoroughfare. It's not a scene from the latest Kannada movie, but real life. You will find precisely that happening in City Market and Majestic, on April 4. Nearly 600 teachers and principals of Morarji Desai Navodaya Residential Schools will take to the streets, in a semi-clad state, and beg for alms. The teachers hit upon this novel way of protesting, to draw the attention of the state government to their demand to regularize their services and treat them as permanent employees.
According to the President of the Karnataka State Morarji Navodays Schools Principals and Teachers Association, M. Vijay, this is what routinely happens in their schools. Every year after the SSLC exams, the teachers' services are terminated in April and they are re-employed in June when the new academic year begins. This way their services are treated as "temporary" and so they are not eligible for any of the benefits that accrue to permanent employees, in addition to the insecurity of not having an assured tenure.
Even during the intervening period of two months between April and June, the teachers do not stop working. They sort out marksheets and prepare transfer certificates (TCs). Still, they are not paid anything with the result that they find it extremely difficult to make both ends meet during this period.
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"We demand that the government regularize our services, announce a salary hike which is long overdue, provide equal pay opportunity for the principals, and counseling sessions for transfer of our teachers on the lines of what the Department of Public Welfare conducted recently for other teachers," the association stated. The association has lined up a series of agitation programmes to pressure the government. They have given the government time till April 3, and if the government turns a deaf ear to their demands, will go on a begging protest from the next day. If even this fails to impress the government, the teachers will stage a protest before the Chief Minister's residence on April 7. And then follow it up with a hunger strike if their demands are not met.
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