Now, teachers assigned counting duty

Aparna Banerji

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, September 21

After performing election duties, teachers in the district have now been assigned the counting duties for the Zila Parishad elections.

Earlier, teachers had alleged anomalies in assigning the election duties. Now, they will remain busy with the counting duties on Saturday.

Many teachers came to know about their duties after some delay. Moreover, a large number of teachers will have to perform duties at faraway centres.

A district-based teacher said, “I came to know about my duty at 12.30 pm when I was in the school. I was supposed to report for my duty at 11 am. I reached the reporting centre after a delay of one and a half hours. For the past one week or so, we have been busy with the election duties. We will start perfroming our duties from 7 am onwards on Saturday. We haven’t received allowances for the past two years. Earlier, the duties were assigned near our schools. This time, a person from Shahkot is performing duties in Adampur. There are a large number of teachers who have been deputed at centres that are several kilometres away.”

Karnal Phillaur, president of the Government Teachers’ Union, said, “For the past few days, we have been assigned BLO duties. After the counting, we shall be back again for our job to revise voters’ lists. We are yet to get our allowances for the BLO duties, which we did in 2017 and 2018. Last year, we received Rs3,000 for duties performed in 2015.”

Of over 16,000 teachers working in the district Education Department, about 40 per cent of them had performed the election duties.

In other districts, the teaching staff were exempted from performing the BLO duties.

The irony is that despite repeated requests by teachers, the same bunch of teachers is being assigned the BLO duties – without rotation – for the past eight or more years.