Contract lecturers strike hits students

Ongole: The students in government junior, degree and polytechnic colleges are in a fix as the contract lecturers in these are on strike for nearly a month now.

The government, which should solve the issue, is looking it as a matter of a few hundred lecturers, but forgot that it can shatter the dreams of thousands of students and their career opportunities this year.

There are 448 government junior, degree and polytechnic colleges in the State with more than two lakh students in them.

These colleges didn’t have good laboratories, sufficient teachers and infrastructure to encourage students to perform well in the final exams. The children of poor and backward families occupy major share of the students in these government colleges.

Though they have dreams of achieving big in life, it is very hard to make a path from these colleges, whose situation is no better in the past few decades.

Moved by the pathetic situation of the government colleges, the government introduced contract lecturers in 2000. In all, 5000 plus lecturers in these colleges, the then Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu appointed nearly 3,700 lecturers on a contract basis.

Since then the lecturers in the government colleges are waiting for the regularisation of their service and getting equal salary for equal work.

As there is no response from the government for the past16 years, 3,687 contract lecturers in the State announced protests at the Collectorate and started relay hunger strike in all districts.

Kummarakunta Suresh, president of the contract lecturers JAC in Prakasam district said, “We started working with meagre salaries of Rs 4,000 in 2000-01 and the salaries increased to Rs 18,000 for intermediate and Rs 27,000 for degree college lecturers.

The regular lecturers are getting about Rs 50,000 as salaries for the same work. We demand the government keep its poll promise of regularising the contract lecturers and pay us equal salaries for equal work as per the orders of Supreme Court.”

After struggling for 16 years, the contract lecturers now left the colleges and are spending most of the time at the hunger strike camps near Collectorates.

But the students, who are the poor and cannot afford education outside, are forced to go away from education. Venkateswara Rao of TRR Government Junior College in Kandukur said, “In the corporate colleges, the syllabus is already completed but in our college, there is about 40 per cent pending.

From this year, the government introduced jumbling system in practical exams, but we have no idea about it. Up to now, there is not much infrastructure in laboratory, but now the experiments also not completed as per the syllabus.

The lecturers are on strike and we have no classes going on for more than three weeks. The lecturers and the government forgot that there is a weightage for marks in intermediate in NEET from next year.

Due to this strike of lecturers, we are losing marks in labs and final exams as the experiments and syllabus are not completed in time.”

There are 220 lecturers in junior colleges, 21 in degree and 20 in polytechnic colleges in Prakasam district. There is only one regular lecturer in the junior colleges in Ballikurava, Donakonda, Marripudi, Kandukur, PC Palli, and Chirala.

That means, there are no classes going on in the colleges when the contract lecturers are unavailable. Rajasekhara Reddy, a contract lecturer is Ballikurava college said, “We do not want this strike as it is the studies of students.

But we are forced by the government with its negligence towards us. We have no other option than going to strike and we want the students and parents understand us.

Once the government offers a solution to our problem, we are ready to take extra classes and extra hours to the students during Sankranti and other holidays to complete the syllabus.”