June 15, 1998

While opportunities are closing for students in 232 universities, their teachers are fighting over pay packets.

By Sumit Mitra

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." Transplant the lines from Shaw's Man and Superman to India -- land of 3.5 lakh irate teachers in 232 universities and over 8,700 colleges -- and the Shavian witticism acquires tragic undertones. The irony is, the teachers are selling a "service" of doubtful value. With the doors of jobs virtually slammed on the country's 65 lakh students aspiring to become "bamadphils" (BA, MA, DPhil), the Government is at a loss to frame the teachers' revised pay-scales. Its task has been made more difficult by the teachers' questionable recruitment norms, a near-total absence of their accountability and mounting wage expectations.

The teachers' grouse is against the heavyweight Union Minister for Human Resource Development (hrd) Murli Manohar Joshi -- himself a former professor of the Allahabad University -- who is tenaciously sticking to a revised wage offer that exactly matches, at the bottom rung, an ias fresher's first pay packet. The teachers, on the other hand, are demanding pay-scales recommended by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Under this, a college teacher even without a PhD degree is promised a basic initial pay of Rs 10,000 a month, which is Rs 2,000 more than his IAS counterpart's. The matter is now before the Delhi High Court, which has ordered the Government and the teachers' unions to sort out the wage dispute before its next date for hearing in early August.

College and university education in India is almost entirely subsidised by the Union Government, with teachers' salary bills met through grants from the UGC. The UGC had in the past formed pay commissions and subsequent Union governments had accepted their recommendations. However, Joshi has changed the rules of the game by saying at the beginning of negotiations that the UGC recommendations are "irrelevant". Instead, he sprang a surprise on the teachers when he offered a pay-scale with an increased weightage given to PhD, a quota system introduced for "senior readers" and "senior professors", and the top salary fixed at Rs 22,400, lower than the UGC-recommended ceiling.

It led to the inevitable deadlock with the court's intervention. Joshi says, "I would have got the new pay-scales notified had the matter not gone to court." But the teachers are in no mood to accept the "Joshi package". During a recent meeting between the minister and teachers' representatives, S.C. Panda, secretary to the Delhi University Teachers' Association (DUTA) -- who belongs to the pro-Congress Action for Academic Development (AAD) -- walked out in a huff. The pro-Marxist Democratic Teachers' Front (DTF) is also opposed to any compromise on the ugc pay-scales. It is only the BJP-controlled National Democratic Teachers' Front (NDTF) which is understandably sympathetic to Joshi's stand. DUTA president Shri Ram Oberoi is himself from the pro-BJP team, but the group's following in the notoriously militant DUTA falls short of majority. Besides, the much larger national union, the All India Federation of University and College Teachers' Organisation (AIFUCTO), is dominated by Marxist sympathisers. Sources in the teachers' unions say that Joshi's tough stand is bringing the Congress and leftist groups together on the common platform for a long showdown as the campuses reopen next month.

While both Joshi and the teachers' unions tend to present the current face-off as a battle over a few thousand rupees, the more contentious issue is how to define teachers' accountability. Last year, a UGC-appointed committee headed by former Banaras Hindu University vice-chancellor R.P. Rastogi opened a Pandora's box by specifying such accountability in terms of self-appraisal, assessment by students and adherence to some workload norms. Joshi has put the accountability issue on the backburner. He says: "I'll form a committee on teacher's accountability only after the present dispute is settled."

Many believe that's putting the cart before the horse because teaching jobs in India are increasingly becoming a free-wheeling paradise. The UGC regulation provides for universities and colleges to have a minimum of 180 teaching days, but the Rastogi Committee reported that the actual number of teaching days were no more than 140 in most cases. Again, the workload of a teacher in full employment is stipulated to be not less than 40 hours a week for 30 working weeks in an academic year. The actual student-contact hours are 55 per cent of the stipulated workload for undergraduate classes and 35 per cent for the post-graduate teachers, the rest of the time being kept aside for research, preparation for teaching and self-improvement. However, in a vast majority of colleges and half of the universities, the actual hours of availability for a teacher are less than a half of the requirement laid down by the UGC.

For better accountability of teachers, the Rastogi Committee recommended students' assessment of teachers, a proposal which has since been rejected by the UGC. The proposal soon became the butt of ridicule -- a DUTA member calls it "trial by the baba log court" -- not so much for its impracticability as for the new norms of popularity among students that include leniency in examining answer papers and readiness to provide hot tips before examinations.

While nobody has been able to suggest a clear yardstick for teachers' accountability, the recruitments are getting murkier by the day. Entry into the service is governed by the National Eligibility Test, but its assessment norms are far from transparent. Besides, with the governing bodies of private colleges generally controlled by local politicians, patronage plays a big role in the selection from among eligible candidates. With no system in place to weed out the inefficient teachers, the institution must live with the ill effects of a bad recruitment for a teacher's career span of 30-35 years.

In the troubled wage bargain between the teachers and the government, the real problem that the latter is facing is to assess the quality, if not the utility, of the teachers' service before agreeing to shell out more money. Currently, 6 per cent of the population in the 17-23 age-group is enrolled for higher education, and this number is growing with the rapid spread of school education. Only about 10 per cent of these post-school students are enrolled in professional courses. The vast majority goes through five wasted years, under teachers who had got into a job somehow but are under no obligation to maintain a tangible level of quality. Joshi wants to sort out the wage problem first, but that's a bit like haggling over price without weighing the chicken.

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