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Journalism of Courage
It was July 2015, and as incessant rains continued, Uttara Bahuguna (57), who had freshly joined the primary school in Uttarkashi district’s Naugaon area as principal, started walking from her one-room rented home towards the school, about 500 m away. She needed to cross the main road to start an uphill walk to the school, but the road was waterlogged. “I stepped on the road and water was above my knees,” she recalls.
“Two people held my hands to help me cross the road,” Bahuguna says, adding, “At my age, it is difficult to cross the road each day and reach the school drenched and tired.”
On Thursday, Bahuguna says, she entered Chief Minister Trivendra Rawat’s Janata Darbar “with the hope that I will be transferred out of the remote village”.
However, what followed was an argument between Bahuguna and Rawat over her transfer, which Rawat was unwilling to allow.
Bahuguna says apart from ill-health, she had also sought a transfer so that she can stay with her son, 21, and daughter, 23. Her husband died in August 2015.
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“There’s no one now to take care of my children, I have to be with them,” she says, seated at her three-room house in Dehradun.
Bahuguna says the school has one teacher other than her.
In 25 years of service, she has been posted in remote locations for 17 years. She has been on leave since August 19 last year due to “health and family reasons” and will be in Dehradun till further orders from education department.
On Friday, the state government initiated an enquiry against Bahuguna. School Education Secretary Bhupinder Kaur Aulakh told the media that other than the past year, Bahuguna had been absent between August 5, 2015 and April 10, 2017. Also, she was suspended from duty twice earlier — on November 20, 2008, and on July 27, 2011.
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Bahuguna told The Indian Express, “In 2008, I was suspended after I remained absent for long since my husband was unwell. In 2011, then CM Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank ordered my suspension when he was infuriated at my request for transfer to Dehradun since my husband was ill.”
While Chief Minister Rawat has drawn flak for the Janata Darbar incident, the issue has highlighted his wife Sunita Rawat’s case. Sunita too is a government school teacher, but unlike Bahuguna, has been posted in Dehradun for 22 years now.
The reply to an RTI query by Praveen Sharma of Jan Sangharsh Morcha, which claims to be an organisation that raises issues of corruption, reveals that Sunita has been posted in Dehradun since August 1996.
Raghunath Singh Negi, a former BJP leader who heads the Morcha, said, “That the CM’s wife has not been shifted to remote locations in the past 22 years raises several questions”.
Transfers of government employees in Uttarakhand has been a point of contention and it is believed that the people with “right approach” can get posting of their choice, CM Rawat had said last year while mentioning that a Transfer Act would be brought in to make rules strict. Eventually, the Transfer Act, 2017 was established.
An official in state education department said, “The Chief Minister’s wife has completed over 10 years in Dehradun, so as per the Transfer Act, she’s eligible to be transferred to a remote location. The primary school teacher (Bahuguna) has been posted in ‘durgam’ (remote) areas for over 10 years, so she is eligible for a transfer to a ‘sugam’ (comfortable) location. However, transfers are subject to vacancies”.
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