Officials in the Chief Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Sub-Committee on contract lecturers seem to be divided on the issue of providing job security to thousands of temporary teaching staff working in junior, degree and polytechnic government colleges across the State.
While officials in the CMO and the finance department are going ahead with the preparation of the list of vacant posts and clearing it at the behest of Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy, the Cabinet Sub-Committee, constituted by the CM himself in 2011, is yet to take a decision on contract lecturers.
As the CMO is clearing junior and degree college lecturers’ recruitment notification and restricting the contract of degree and polytechnic lecturers to only three months (till September) for 2013-14 academic year, as many as 11,366 contract lecturers working in 1,235 colleges have decided to go on a strike from June 24.
In keeping with the Chief Minister’s promise of issuing notifications to 1.16 lakh government jobs after assuming the mantle in November 2010, his office had cleared the decks to fill more than 5,000 junior lecturer posts in early 2011 when contract lecturers raised their voice demanding job security.
Stalling the notification, the Chief Minister then constituted a six- member Cabinet Sub-Committee headed by the then health minister DL Ravindra Reddy and comprising ministers Anam Ramanarayana Reddy, Erasu Pratap Reddy, D Sridhar Babu, S Sailajanath and Kolusu Parthasarathi to find a solution.
The committee has met several times since to resolve the issue, but despite making some favourable statements in support of contract lecturers unofficially, they neither made an official statement nor sent a report to the Chief Minister’s office so far. They met last on May 1 and leaked information to a section of the media that they were in favour of providing job security to contract lecturers.
When the contract lecturers’ associations were expecting a positive decision from the government, the CMO Office cleared the decks for issuing a notification for recruiting 4,532 junior lecturers and over 600 contract lecturers.
Recently, the government issued two separated GOs on June 17 and 21 extending the contract of degree and polytechnic contract lecturers by only three months against the regular contract term of 10 months. Though a delegation of MLCs on behalf of contract lecturers met the chief secretary, finance secretary and officials in the CMO, the MLCs were told that the CM is firm on issuing JL and DL notifications.
Speaking to Express, Contract Lecturers’ Association general secretary K Suresh said it is not correct on the part of the CM to take a decision in a hurry and restricting the contract to only three months, even as the report of the sub-committee comprising senior members of the cabinet is still awaited.
The state has 824 government junior colleges with about 13,000 lecturers. However, only 4,600 permanent junior lecturers are working in these colleges at present and the remaining 8,400 posts have been filled with contract staff for the last 13 years. And there are as many as 256 government degree colleges with about 6,018 lecturer posts, but only 3,251 permanent lecturers are working with them.