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Ravi Dhaliwal
Tribune News Service
Gurdaspur, May 20
The state Education Department is flouting Right to Education (RTE) rules by appointing teachers as legal advisers in district headquarters.
Norms state that teachers cannot be assigned any other work apart from election and census duties. In almost all the 22 districts of the state, teachers, or in some cases clerks, have been asked to take care of court cases of their colleagues. These “legal advisers”, who do not possess any law degree, have their offices on the premises of the District Education Officer (DEO), Secondary.
Teachers often approach courts to settle claims pertaining to pensions, seniority, increments, transfers and appointments. These legal advisers, who are often the blue-eyed persons of the DEO or the local MLA, are asked to defend these teachers by vetting their petitions and hiring advocates on their behalf.
Teachers’ union leaders, who have decided to take up the issue with senior department officials, claim that when these teachers go out of schools to perform duties of legal advisers the studies of children suffer as no alternative arrangements are made. Of late, Education Service Providers have been asked to fill the vacancies, but this, sources say, is not a viable alternative. “This is a poor substitute as ESPs cannot be compared to regular teachers. ESPs are not well paid as compared to regular employees. We have decided to approach the Education Minister to sort out things because the teaching work is suffering. A teacher, whenever he decides to approach the court, can be well defended only if his case is vetted by somebody who holds a law degree and not by a teacher who is working as a legal adviser. This system has been in place for the last several years and now the time has come to change it,” said Bhupinder Singh Waraich, president of the Punjab unit of the Democratic Teachers Front.
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