The state department of education was in the news again for all the wrong reasons. This time it was concerned with the primary teachers under the Sub Division Education Officer Kohima who had gathered outside the office of the said officer to protest the deduction in their salary. An interesting disclosure was that the teachers had arbitrarily extended their summer vacations by a week and some even by 10 days more than what the government had announced. The officer on the other hand also reacted by deducting the salaries of those teachers of the schools that had extended the vacation. There were allegations by some of the teachers that the officer had transferred the deducted salaries in his own account which is yet to be verified by any competent authority. However the benefit of doubt is given to the teachers since the whole drama ended with the officer assuring the representatives of the teachers to reimburse the deducted amount.
Such occurrences have actually no place in a civilised society with people who understand the rule of law. It reflects a very bad image of an organisation/body that is concerned with the education of children. It also portrays the attitudinal rawness of the people involved and the society’s scarcity of refinement when a collective decision simply overrides the rules laid down.
The officer even though had the right to enforce disciplinary actions like the deduction of salary, his action of bowing down to the gathered crowd of teachers only makes his action more questionable. Going by the news report, it indicates that he got the chance just to make some quick buck out of the indiscipline of the teachers under his office and did not follow the correct procedure of remitting the deducted amount to the state exchequer.
The concerned department never fails to fill the news pages since the days of the bogus/fake teacher’s episode and a SIT had to be constituted by the state government a few years back. It is as if the department not satisfied with the existing controversies like the issue of proxy teachers, co-terminus issues, dual employment issues, mid-day meal issues, special teacher’s issues, Hindi teacher’s issues had to engineer the current one to maintain the regularity. It has to be an aberration and not the rule but since it occurred in the state capital itself, it is not easy to cast it away just as an exception.
