LR DAV College teachers end protest following assurance regarding their long due salaries

LR DAV College teachers end protest following assurance regarding their long due salaries

Ludhiana

A three-day protest of the teachers employed under management financed posts in the Lajpat Rai DAV College, Jagraon, ended on Wednesday after getting assurance from the Director of Higher Education of DAV Colleges, regarding their long pending salaries.

A total of 10 teachers staged a protest on Monday and continued till Wednesday after the non-payment of their due salaries for the past 14 months.

Vice Principal Vikas Mendiratta who also participated in the protest, said, “We were not paid for continuous 16 months, and it is only a few days back that we received the salary for the last year for the month of May and half the total amount for the month of April. We had no other option but to stage a protest in order to awaken the management in the view of our long pending salaries.”

Commenting on the reason behind the non-payment of their salaries, Mendiratta said that the admissions have been affected in the past few years. “Students prefer moving abroad rather than pursuing higher education here. In Bachelor of Arts courses, the number of students has significantly decreased and the seats in the post-graduate courses excluding commerce and science lie vacant. A total of nearly 450 students are left in a college where the strength should be around 1,500,” he informed.

He added that the management of DAV Colleges should have transferred the teachers to the DAV Colleges in other cities where there is a staff crunch to avoid this chaos.

DAV Coordination Committee coordinator Sukhdev Randhawa remarked, “An assurance has been given by the Director of Higher Education of DAV Colleges Shivraman Gaur that their salaries for six months would be paid by August 20.”

Pallavi Kataria, commerce teacher who has been associated with the college since 2011, said that a concrete solution is needed to avoid the same in near future. “We have been assured that we would receive the amount for six months soon, so we would wait for another few days, but it has been extremely difficult for us to manage our medical, household and our children’s educational expenses during these months,” she said.