Teachers’ union to protest at CM Bhagwant Mann’s house today

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, June 29

Members of the Democratic Teachers Front (DTF) will hold a state-level protest against the Chief Minister at his residence in Jalandhar on Sunday.

The immediate trigger for the protest is the poor performance of the school education department and the Education Minister, though they say the failure of the government to fulfil the promises made during several meetings with them earlier this year put them on the warpath.

DTF state president Vikram Dev Singh, general secretary Mukesh Kumar and finance secretary Ashwani Awasthi today said that during its two-year tenure, the AAP government had set milestones in non-responsive behaviour towards them, rather than solving the teachers’ problems in a timely manner.

The union leaders said a large contingent of more than 100 state and district leaders would march towards the Chief Minister’s residence in Jalandhar at 11 am. They said they would hand over a ‘protest letter’ to the Chief Minister.

Teachers said that their major complaint and cause for the protest was the non-regularisation of ODL (Open and Distance Learning) teachers (some of whose regularisations were pending), and 13 Hindi teachers out of 7,654 whose regularisation orders are stalled.

They said they would demand that the pending regularisations be immediately attended to, and action on the Jakhwali case be taken. Until these complaints were resolved, they would continue their protest.

They said they would also press for the restoration of the old pension scheme and pay scales, and the restoration of deducted allowances — including ACP scheme, rural allowance and border area allowance — and payment of pending DA instalments.

Their demands include the regularisation of all contractual teachers in the Education Department; implementation of the Sixth Punjab Pay Commission; reversal of the mid-way withdrawal of grants sent to government schools in the 2023-24 session; removal of errors in seniority lists; pending promotion of ETT to master cadre; clearing pending promotions of masters, lecturers, headmasters, principals; and stopping the Punjab School Education Board from implementing the ‘unjustified’ syllabus changes being made by NCERT under NEP-2020, etc. They said they want immediate redressal of these demands.

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