BLO duties for computer teachers yet again

Aparna Banerji

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, January 15

After spending over a month gathering the data of voters in the district, the computer teachers in Jalandhar have yet again been reallocated jobs as booth level officers (BLOs) to update and feed the data gathered during the previous duties onto online portals.

While the Education Department had allocated the duties of teachers from November 15 to December 15, the jobs have been reallocated to computer teachers who shall be gathering the data from the BLOs and feeding it onto online portals.

A computer teacher said, “We are already overburdened as a number of clerical works are also being taken from us. Now, on top of this, we have again been burdened with BLO duties. While the work for making photocopies of papers for the ongoing school tests has been allocated to computer teachers, the additional work is causing a lot of anger among teachers.”

Members of the Sanjha Adhyapak Morcha shall also be holding a huge protest on the issue at Phillaur on January 17. Teachers at the Phillaur block shall also be holding a dharna on the issue, as per which they shall be submitting a memorandum to the SDM, Phillaur. A notice regarding this has already been served to the administration.

“All BLOs shall be required to present their respective data to the computer teachers in their respective blocks. All the data that we collected during the BLO duties from November 15 to December 17 shall be shared with the computer teachers to be filled onto the online portal. A huge amount of information and comprehensive details have been collected by teachers. The same shall be shared with the computer teachers, all of which will have to be fed again. This is no small task and it will take at least four to five days for a single BLO’s data to be uploaded. While the computer teachers have already been overburdened with a plethora of clerical works, piling up this additional task on them is unfair. Teachers are the unsuspecting scapegoats for all such tasks which clearly takes a toll on studies,” said a district-based BLO.

Notably, the data collected during the previous voter summary revision surveys which BLOs conducted in 2017 end included information of voters who turned 18 in January 2018, along with their families, information on voters who were aged 17 as on 1/1/2000, information of NRI and overseas voters and all their family details.