Fearing job loss, govt engineering teachers stage protest in Delhi

More than 100 contract teachers from government engineering colleges in several states, all equipped with IIT and NIT degrees, protested against imminent job loss for themselves and about 1,300 colleagues in Delhi. 

As per a report published in The Telegraph, the teachers alleged that they had got caught in a “tussle” between the Centre and state governments after taking up their jobs three years ago on the strength of an assurance that a veteran academic on Tuesday described as “misleading”. Amarjeet Jhajhariya, assistant professor at the MLV Textile College in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, said, “We are facing ouster from our jobs on September 30. We’ll agitate at Mandi House every day until the government promises to retain us in our jobs.” 

Jhajhariya is one of nearly 1,400 contractual engineering teachers whom the Centre recruited in January 2018. He was recruited under the World Bank-assisted Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) III scheme to state-run colleges in 12 states and Union Territories where the quality of engineering education was not good. 

These were Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Tripura, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 

One of the requirements was that the candidates must have earned at least one of their degrees — BTech, MTech or PhD — from either an IIT or an NIT. All selected candidates, some of whom had given up corporate jobs, were MTech or PhD holders and were appointed assistant professors. 

The Union Education Ministry (then Human Resource Development ministry) paid their salary under the TEQIP III. 

Under a memorandum of understanding signed between the Centre and the states, the Union Education Ministry was to pay the salaries for two years and nine months till the TEQIP III project ended in September 2020. 

After that, the states would retain the “well-performing faculty hired using the project funds”, the MoU said rather vaguely. Eventually, the Centre gave two six-month extensions to these teachers, the second of which expires at the end of this month. 

Neither the states nor the Centre are now keen to retain them even as contract teachers, let alone regularise them, the agitating teachers said. 

Read more: 

• TEQIP teachers demand regularisation in services
• TEQIP III to conclude on September 30, Education Ministry asks states to continue activities under project