Along with a letter to our President Pranab Mukherjee, the teachers serving Delhi University on an ad-hoc basis have also sent a memorandum in this regard to the Prime Minister’s Office, HRD Ministry and University Grants Commission (UGC).
According to a report by The Indian Express, over 200 ad-hoc teachers of the University of Delhi have written a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee, requesting regularisation of nearly 4,500 such teachers who have been serving the varsity for several years in university departments and colleges. Unfortunately, the mentioned teachers mark half of the total faculty positions in the university.
Despite highest qualifications in the field of knowledge, these teachers are only recognized by the University administrators as numbers and mostly considered in the months of April-June when they get subjected to a repetitive ritual of filling the forms and facing yet another interview in the month of July, only to answer the golden question: “What new will you bring this year?”. With basic minimum wages, these teachers are faced with bitter refusal of medical leave or paid leave to get married or have kids, and denied basic necessities such as library membership, computers and password to Wi-Fi connection or real rooms to sit in.
On being deeply affected by the current situation, one of the ad-hoc teachers shared her thoughts on how this has, “dissuaded my brightest students from teaching as a career option. When they saw me sitting in the corridors, waiting to face yet another humiliating interview, their ideas about a good teacher crashed. The disparaging reality of teaching as a profession dawned on them just when they had become passionate about it.”
As per the University Grants Commission (UGC) and Delhi University’s guidelines, ad-hoc appointments should be made for a short period of not more than four months and proportion of these faculties should not be more than 10 per cent of the total number of teachers.
However, it seems that the varsity of Delhi University has developed a culture of appointing ad-hoc faculties even on permanent sanctioned posts for years, which has lead to a situation so critical that in some colleges, the proportion of ad-hoc faculties has reached to 90 per cent who have been working for 5 to 10 years and in few cases, even more than 20 years on an ad-hoc basis.
“We demand that the appointments of those ad-hoc teachers who have been serving the university for years be regularized and they be saved from the discriminatory and exploitative service conditions which are affecting the teaching-learning environment of the premier institution.”, the letter said.
With Inputs from: The Indian Express
Image Credits: www.scroll.in
Shagun Marwah
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