BHUBANESWAR: The demand of lecturers recruited by the State Selection Board (SSB) for ‘equal work and equal pay’ on par with their government counterparts was rejected by the Higher Education department on Thursday.
The SSB lecturers assigned to non-government aided colleges in the state are demanding revision of their grade pay from Rs 4,600 to Rs 5,400 with retrospective effect from 2016.
The department said all the SSB lecturers participated in the recruitment process conscious of the prescribed pay scale and service conditions, and accepted the placements accordingly before joining the non-government-aided colleges.
Rule-9 of Odisha Education (Recruitment & Conditions of Service of Teachers and Members of the Staff of Aided Educational Institutions) Rules, 1974 is an aspirational provision of the government and accordingly, the pay scale of SSB lecturers has been covered under different pay revisions with regards to the ways and means of the government, it said.
Department officials informed that though SSB lecturers are recruited by the government, their services are placed with governing bodies of non-government aided colleges. Hence, their claim for parity with their government counterparts is not acceptable to the extent that they are also grant-in-aid employees and their pay scale is subject to the ways and means of the government.
They further reasoned that since SSB lecturers and government lecturers belong to different cadres, their designations cannot be treated as same due to different recruitment process and service conditions. As such, SSB lecturers have not been declared as government servants. Accordingly, their petition to the chief minister for revision of pay was rejected, they added.
Secretary of Odisha SSB Lecturers’ Association Lambodar Rout said the state government stopped recruitment of lecturers in aided degree colleges after 1992 and resumed it in 2016. Lecturers in government degree colleges and aided colleges were given the same scale of pay in the past. But after 2016, this pay scale was reduced for SSB lecturers despite the same nature and amount of work, he added.