Novel protest: Singla’s video logs 8.9K ‘dislikes’

Karam Prakash

Tribune News Service

Patiala, June 14

After bombarding CM Capt Amarinder Singh’s live interaction on online video sharing platform YouTube with “dislikes”, government school teachers have extended a similar treatment to Education Minister Vijay Inder Singla.

The Democratic Teachers Front, an organisation of government schoolteachers, said the government was hiding its failures under the garb of recent education ranking, which was based on “false data”.

As on Monday morning, the Education Minister’s interview had logged 8.9K “dislikes” against 488 “likes”. Similarly, CM’s video had received more “dislikes” than “likes”. Calling Punjab’s first rank in the country in the field of education “sham”, the organisation said they would continue to dislike government videos.

Recently, the state ranked first in the national performance grading index of school education for 2019-20, released by the Centre. However, schoolteachers, especially union leaders, objected to the ranking, saying it was based on “false data”.

Vikram Dev, state president, DTF, said: “We have asked teachers if they think the government has been projecting a manipulated image of the department to earn the ranking, they should dislike videos as a mark of protest. False ranking is being used for political gain.” He said the use of schoolteachers by the government for political gain was a matter of shame.