THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The image of 98-year-old Karthiyayani Amma, the face of the state’s literacy movement, receiving the ‘Nari Shakti Puraskar’ from the President is still afresh in our minds. The nonagenarian from Alappuzha, along with 105-year-old Bhageerathi Amma from Kollam, won the honour for not letting age affect their pursuit of knowledge. However, the plight of ‘preraks’ of the Kerala State Literacy Mission Authority, who work at the grassroots level imparting literacy to around one lakh people in the non-formal education sector, often goes unnoticed.
Since March this year, around 1,860 ‘preraks’ have been left in the lurch and have not received even a single penny as honorarium. In 2017, their honorarium under different categories was raised to Rs 15,000 for nodal preraks, Rs 12,000 for preraks and Rs 10,500 for assistant preraks. But even four years down the line, none of them have received the full honorarium on any given month due to unreasonable targets and pay cuts for various reasons.
As literacy activities came to a grinding halt due to the pandemic last year, these ‘preraks’ have been rendering yeoman service at various panchayats as Covid frontline workers.With the Literacy Mission expressing inability to support the preraks, the state general education department issued an order re-deploying them to local bodies by March 31. But the file relating to their re-deployment has been hanging fire for months due to official apathy and red tape.
Even while carrying out Covid duties in the face of the raging pandemic, the preraks had to struggle with their downsized honorarium. But things turned worse after the file relating to their redeployment got stuck. With no pay for three months now, they recently shared their litany of woes on General Education Minister V Sivankutty’s Facebook page.
“The situation is such that we are neither identified as staff of panchayats nor as literacy mission workers. Though we are part of the Covid brigade and are willing to undertake literacy activities when the situation improves, authorities pass the buck when it comes to paying us,” said A A Santhosh, secretary, Kerala State Preraks Association.
General Education Secretary A P M Mohammad Hanish said there was some delay in obtaining the complete list of ‘preraks’ from the literacy mission. “We have been actively pursuing the case of the preraks for the past one month. The initial list submitted by literacy mission had some anomalies and these are being rectified. We are hopeful of completing the redeployment process at the earliest,” he told TNIE.