CHENNAI: Guest lecturers from government arts and science colleges in Tamil Nadu are disappointed after the State refused to revise their wages in over three years.
The government on June 21, ordered the Higher Education Department to pay each guest lecturer Rs 15,000 a month as per previous pay norms.
This has irked guest lecturers particularly because the higher education department had recently promised to come up with a permanent employment solution for them.
Mangat Ram Sharma, principal secretary, Higher Education, was not available for comments. However, he had told Express in May that the department was working on regularising the services of guest lecturers. “We are working on a more permanent solution. We are strategising ways to make them permanent employees,” he had said.
“Despite doing as much work as regular lecturers, we get paid only Rs 15,000, without scope for performance-based appraisal,” charged Venkatesan Thangaraj from Tamil Nadu All Government College UGC Qualified Guest Lecturers Association. Guest lecturers are often victims of delayed or irregular payment of salaries, he said.
In January this year, UGC hiked the salary for guest lecturers in colleges and universities to ` 1,500 per lecture subject to a maximum of Rs 50,000 per month. In February 2010, the UGC made a similar announcement and fixed the maximum pay for guest lecturers as Rs 25,000. Haryana government recently revised the wages of guest lecturers to Rs 57,700 a month.
The Tamil Nadu government is yet to implement the hike in wages, said Thangaraj. “Colleges use us to compensate for their vacancies. Therefore, we teach the same number of hours as regular faculty does and still do not get the pay mandated by UGC,” said a guest lecturer from Thiruvannamalai Government Arts and Science College, on condition of anonymity.