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Payscales upped for college teachers in Bihar

Soroor Ahmed in Patna

The pay packets of 17,000 university and college teachers in Bihar will be fatter by at least Rs 2,000 to 2,500 per month following the Rabri government's October 20 decision to implement the UGC payscale from January 1996.

College and university teachers, who have been drawing a scale of Rs 2200-4000 plus 206 per cent DA and other allowances will now have payscales starting at Rs 8500 plus perks.

Though the implementation of the UGC scale is a routine business, the move has acquired political significance since it comes ahead of the assembly election due early next year. College teachers' associations feel the state government remembered to implement the new payscale only after the thrashing it received in the recently-held Lok Sabha election.

The state government agreed to pay the salary for the four months of the strike to over half-a-million non-gazetted employees immediately after the election result was announced.

However, state government sources say the implementation of the new payscale or the release of the salaries of non-gazetted employees had nothing to do with the coming assembly election.

"In fact the four months salary of the strike period was held up by the then governor, Chief Justice B M Lal, who cited the court order calling for 'no work, no pay'. Similarly, the implementation of teachers' new salaries is a routine affair and the government was about to announce it before the parliamentary election, but for a last-minute hitch," a government source said.

Over half-a-million government employees went on strike from January 16 till May 8. Under the agreement signed with the state government the striking employees were assured that they would get their salary and the days lost in strike would be compensated from their earn leaves.

Prof Ram Jatan Sinha, the president of the Federation of University Service Teachers Association of Bihar, while welcoming the decision termed it as a belated step taken by the government without taking the teachers' body into confidence.

"The details should have been finalised only after consulting the teachers' association. True the pay scale has been implemented but why not the promotional and retirement benefits. Why have the state government not enhanced the retirement age to 62 as per the UGC criteria," he asked.

However, most of the teachers whom this correspondent talked to blamed the teachers' association for the delay in implementation of the pay-scale which was announced by the UGC about a year back. " Bina mange jo mil jay thik hai (Whatever we get without demanding it is fine with us), commented a senior professor at Patna University.

In fact, Dr Jawaid Hayat, one of the executives of Patna University, does not think that there was any delay in implementing the payscale as it is made out.

"By Bihar standard it is all right. Last time the pay revision was made in 1986, but in Bihar it was implemented in 1996. This time, the UGC revised the scale in 1996, and the state government implemented it in 1996 and that without any formal demand by various teachers association," he told rediff.com.

But the FUSTAB president strongly denounced that they had not made any demand. "We met the chief minister, Rabri Devi, her husband, Laloo Yadav, besides education minister and education secretary a number of times but to no avail. Education is nowhere in the priority list of this government who detest intelligentsia as it did not support it. The truth is that 80 per cent of salary money in the first five years would be borne by the UGC and only 20 per cent by the state government," Prof Sinha, who is also a former Congress MLA, told rediff.com.

There is no denying that the Laloo-Rabri regime has always been indifferent to university and college teachers because most of them belong to the upper castes. One college teacher said the retirement age had not been raised for the same reason and that things might change if the government does not change when members of the Other Backward Castes and dalits become college teachers in large numbers.

The state government too has had trouble with academic institutions. In the eighties when the chief minister was Dr Jagannath Mishra, there were over a hundred private affiliated colleges all over the state that existed only on paper, thus adding to the burden on the exchequer.

Large-scale fake and illegal appointments were made in these colleges. One such college is Darheta Lari College, situated in a far-flung village of Jehanabad still has more teachers than students. It may sound bizarre, but a man with a master's degree holder in Hindi was appointed a music teacher while an MA in Geography is working as lecturer of economics at the college.

While many people, even some college teachers, agreed with the Laloo government's attitude towards such dubious institutions, they felt that an attack on all teachers was unjustified. Ergo, their wariness with the state government's sudden wish to please them.

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