Fill 1,700 vacant Urdu teaching posts,federation tells govt

The federation said the language had not been given enough attention in the decades since independence,thus “the recommendations of the Sachar Committee should be implemented with immediate effect in order to uplift the minorities”.

To this,Walia said,“It is not true that Urdu has been put on the back burner. The government recently increased salaries for Urdu teachers from Rs 11,000 to Rs 23,000 and we have also advertised for 100 vacancies for Urdu teachers under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.”

The minister also said the government is taking the Urdu language to the bylanes of Delhi through various measures. “We have tied up with the Agha Khan Foundation in Nizamuddin and we are teaching children the history of the place through storytelling in Urdu,” she said.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit could not make it to the conference. “It has been decided that we will visit her house and give her a copy of this memorandum,” Riyaz Malik,a federation member,said.

According to the memorandum,there are approximately 2.5 lakh Urdu speaking students in 936 secondary schools in Delhi (excluding primary schools of the Delhi government). In these schools,there is a vacancy of approximately 1,427 Urdu teachers,of which “only 69 are regular Urdu teachers”. Among schools run by the civic agencies,there are more than 1,700 vacancies.

The federation demanded that in order to fill all these vacancies,a separate Urdu District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) should be opened or one of the existing DIETs should be dedicated to Urdu for proper training of teachers.

Another demand in the memorandum is that all 17 Delhi government colleges under the Delhi University should have a separate Urdu department for students interested in pursuing higher studies in the subject.