Teachers threaten stir over pending non-salary grants

The president of the association and former union minister Vijay Naval Patil said the state government failed to take a concrete decision on the issue of non-salary grant since 2004. “ The state had disbursed an interim amount of Rs 500 crore towards non-salary grant in 2004,but after that the issue has been neglected. On one hand,the government is promoting higher education by paying subsidy,but on the other,it is denying grants to secondary and higher secondary schools,” added Patil. He said if the government fails to meet the demands,the Mahamandal would resort to agitation. “We have created awareness amongst school managements and have submitted a memorandum of our demands to the school education department. The pending amount to disbursed comes to 2,300 crore,” said Patil.

Another association member,P M Raut,pointed out that government has even stopped the managements from recruiting non-teaching staff. “The government is yet to decide on number of non-teaching staff to be appointed. The decision has to be taken considering the number of students. The government’s decision is pending since 2011. Schools are facing dearth of non-teaching staff,” said Raut

While the state government has decided to take action against 1,500 schools across Maharashtra for showing more than 50 percent bogus students,association says it is unfair. Raut said,“The government should not initiate any action against the school managements. It was due to the contradictory policies of the state government that the absentees were found during the survey,it is not our fault.”

The association is also objecting the provision of setting up local management committee to take school related decisions under Right to Education (RTE) Act,2009. They are demanding that the committee should comprise 75 percent of members from school management. “The interference of the committee in day-to-day management is making it difficult to run schools. Sometimes even decisions like leave of principals have to be taken by this committee which is a parallel school management. Out of 15 members,at least 10 should from school management.,” Patil said. “We have taken note of the demands,the issue has been forwarded to authorities and we will come up with a decision soon,” said a senior official from school education department.