States and Centre are Abandoning us now, say Striking TEQIP Teachers

The teachers employed under the Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) of the Ministry of Education are protesting in the national capital for the previous one month after the colleges funded by the state governments refused to give them permanent positions. The teachers maintain that they were recruited in 2018 through a centrally monitored scheme with the provision that the state governments will employ them on their permanent rolls after evaluating them for three consecutive years.

TEQIP III scheme was rolled out across the country with the aim of improving technical education in most backward districts. The open advertisement for recruitment mandated that the aspirants should have qualified their post-graduate programmes from IITs/NITs. Now the protesting teachers fear that the discontinuation of the programme will bring the improved situation back to zero if the centre and state does not come up with any sustainability plan sooner.

Shivani Dwivedi has been teaching in Government Engineering College, Ajmer for the last three years. She had joined the institution on September 28, 2018. For Dwivedi, years of hard work would go down the drain and jeopardise the future of thousands of students if they are made to leave the programme. Recalling her first day at the college, she told NewsClick, "The situation was so dire that the students took their chairs from one room to another room to attend the classes. There were hardly any machines for experiments. There was no software. It was our intervention that made sure that all these things were put in place. The students did not come to college because there were no regular classes. We convinced them that there would be regular classes. For us, it was a challenge to go to college because it is located on the outskirts of the city. We had to buy our personal vehicles for commuting.”

Dwivedi emphasised that the colleges started receiving their projects from the centre and state governments only after they started conducting research. Dr Nand Kishore Gupta who teaches in the Electrical Engineering department in the college told NewsClick that he recently concluded his research in optimising the microgrid projects which will contribute to making the country self-reliant in the field of renewable energy. Their discontinuation would mean that many such projects would be jeopardised.

"Our recruitment made sure that the student-faculty ratio remains at an optimal level. In my department, there are only three regular teachers. If we exit, there would be one teacher for 45 students. How will they teach them? How will they guide them on machines? Since the pandemic, the students have been learning online. When they will return to the colleges, they would find complex machines but no teachers to help them. They will feel cheated. They took admission with the knowledge that they would be taught by highly qualified teachers who got their degrees from IITs/NITs. Earlier, they were taught by guest teachers who were paid Rs 300/hour. Are we returning to the same situation? If it happens, it will be a big blow to technical education,” Gupta said.

Dwivedi, who is standing beside Gupta, interjects to say, "We are mid-semester now. Who will teach them? How can three regular teachers teach all these students for eight semesters? What motivation will it give them now when they will find that their qualified teachers are on the streets? Will they be motivated to pursue higher education?”

Anand Chaturvedi, a teacher in Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur, said that it is ludicrous that the state governments are failing to abide by the memorandum of understanding they had signed with the centre.

"The central route of recruitment was only chosen because recruitments in the states are generally a long process because of litigations. The centre recruited us, and the states were to evaluate us and absorb us into the colleges. It is similar to the UPSC model where Centre recruits and states take up. Now, both are abandoning us,” Chaturvedi said.

Manish Kumar Gupta, Joint Secretary (Technical Education), Government of Rajasthan, told NewsClick that the position can be made permanent through the prescribed process. He said, ”The project is a remarkable initiative on the part of the centre. They put about Rs 130 crore in Rajasthan and it made technical education better. But it hardly involved us in the implementation part. The National Programme Implementation Unit (NPIU) implemented it through its state arm called SPIU. Since it was a world bank-funded and centre-collaborated project, the state could not deny them. But the funding has stopped now. If the centre assures us about some funding, we will make sure that such a good programme does not end.”

Arun Kumar, Director (Technical Education), Government of Jharkhand, told NewsClick that the teachers came from the central pool for three years and cannot be regularised. He said, "The state employs teachers through our public service commission where our reservation norms are followed. For now, we have given an extension to the teachers in BIT Sindri till March 2022. But they cannot be made permanent. They can apply for state government jobs against sanctioned positions.”

NewsClick tried to contact Alok Kumar, Secretary (Technical Education), Government of Uttar Pradesh. Officials in Kumar’s office said that they would respond to questions later. The story will be updated.