‘Burdened with non-academic tasks’: Punjab govt school teachers announce boycott of ration card duty

Government school teachers in Punjab have announced “complete” boycott of non-academic works after the government deployed them to make new ration cards. The teachers have submitted a memorandum to chief minister Bhagwant Man and deputy commissioners of several districts, stating that if the non-academic duties were not removed within a week, they would boycott it, Indian Express reported.

The official document was submitted to the CMO by Samoodh Adhyaapak Jathebandiyan, which is a group of teachers’ unions, the report read.

A large number of the government school teachers from different districts staged protests outside the Patiala DC office and raised slogans against the Punjab government for issuing orders to make new ration cards, it added.

More than 300 teachers from Patiala and over 1,000 from Ludhiana have been assigned the ration card duty so far, it said.

Notably, the protest was over after the Patiala district administration held a meeting of the protesting government school teachers with the deputy commissioner, the report mentioned.

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'Scrap duties disrupting students' education'

Vikram Dev, state president of the Democratic Teachers Front, said in the report: “The teachers demanded that the district administration should completely scrap non-academic duties disrupting students’ education such as ration card verification, health cards, stubble burning management, and the handling of various types of official correspondence assigned to them.”

Furthermore, on September 14, the Patiala SDM office assigned 337 government school teachers to the duty of verifying ration cards, including 62 from Government Senior Secondary School (Civil Lines), 54 from Multipurpose School, 37 each from Model Town School and School of Eminence (Pheelkhana), 23 from PM SHRI School (Tripuri), and 16 each from New Power House Colony School and Old Police Line School.

“The Punjab government is actively undermining the public education system. Teachers are being increasingly burdened with non-academic tasks and duties, often more so than under previous administrations leaving them occupied with everything except teaching, a situation that is causing the quality of education for the children of the common people to drop to even lower levels,” said a teacher in the report.

The teachers have also stated that teachers were “continuously” been assigned on academic duties such as population census, Special Intensive Revision (SIR), drug surveys, and the creation of health cards.