Police lathicharge protesting teachers near CM’s house in Sangrur
Members of the Education Providers Union, who have been protesting for 19 days, said the state government gave them a marginal salary hike when they have been demanding regular pay scale
: Punjab Police on Saturday resorted to lathicharge to disperse protesting teachers at Khurana village, 2km from chief minister Bhagwant Mann’s rented accommodation in Sangrur, and detained 20 of them.
Sangrur SSP Surendra Lamba said, “The protesters were getting aggressive and we had to use mild force to control the situation. We have detained 20 protesters. The situation is peaceful now.”
The detained teachers were released in the evening.
The teachers were demanding regularisation of their services and alleged that the Aam Aadmi Party government had recently given them only a marginal increment while claiming in an announcement that it had regularised 14,239 teachers and other employees of the education department.
Members of the Education Providers Union, who have been protesting near the chief minister’s house for the past 19 days, said that the government did not pay them according to the scale of regular teachers and neither did it offer other benefits that regular employees get.
Four days ago, CM Bhagwant Mann announced a hike in salaries of 12,700 newly regularised government schoolteachers in the state.
However, the teachers claim that they are not regularised as they are not given any benefits as compared to regularised ones.
Mann announced that out of these 12,700 teachers, BA pass education providers, who were being paid ₹9,500, will now get ₹20,500 per month.
Similarly, teachers with ETT and NTT qualifications will now get ₹22,000. Earlier, their salary was ₹10,250.
Besides this, the salary of teachers with BA/MA BEd degrees have been increased to ₹23,500 from ₹11,000 and salaries of IEV volunteers has been have been hiked from ₹5,500 to ₹15,000 per month.
Union president Manpreet Singh said, “We don’t want an increment in our salaries. We want regular pay scale and regularisation of our services. Therefore, we have rejected this increment.”
State president Teachers’ Democratic Front (DTF) Vikram Dev Singh, who along with other regular teachers participated in the protest, said “The state government claimed that it has regularised these teachers. But there is no pay scale, no civil services rules, no dearness allowance, no medical allowance, no mobile allowance, no GPF, no CPF, no old pension or no new pension for them. It is just a pay hike.”
