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Showing posts from June, 2013

Petition to protect the teachers' right to full salary

Dear Kriticulture Reader, Please read the following text and lend your voice to an urgent cause by signing the petition after clicking the link here: http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Protect_the_teachers_right_to_full_salary/ Introduction A majority of teachers in India, at various levels, are today paid only a fraction of the salaries they should be getting under the rules. It is injustice at a huge scale, and it is perpetrated with the complicity of the executive organ of the both the central and the state governments. The teachers' right to the lawfully deserved wages must be protected not only because they too have rights like all other persons but also because exploited,distressed and tormented teachers cannot give their best to those young human beings whose care has been entrusted to them. Petition The minimum salaries notified by the government are not paid to most teachers, notwithstanding the fact that they have embraced the vocation of teaching after

The Reserve Armies of Academic Labour

By Rajesh Sharma      Another academic year is about to begin. Advertisements for faculty positions are popping out of newspaper pages.  The universal promise is of salary ‘as per the UGC/State Government/University norms’. The opening gambit of a nearly universal ritual of deceit and betrayal!               As teaching for the last academic year ended, a former student who is now an academic journey-woman called me one evening. ‘I have been told not to come from tomorrow. At 5.30 p.m. we were handed letters that our services were no longer required. All fifteen of us have been suddenly dropped as if into the seas. We worked for eight months, usually giving six or seven lectures a day. We were still waiting to receive our appointment letters…. And they did not even bother to pay the one month salary they have been withholding as security since we joined.’               This is the standard experience of the young people who respond to the calling