Private school and college teachers' demands

The fact that some 70,000 teachers of around 7,000 non-government schools and colleges have been receiving their salaries irregularly, some even for more than a decade, is an educational problem with a human dimension. Underlying all this, is of course, education ministry's, or for that matter, government's failure to grapple with the bread and butter issue impacting on their professional work with timely interventions so that these did not go out of control.
In this context, we note that on Thursday, the day before the World Teachers' Day, teachers and employees of private institutions agitating for government salary support near the secretariat met with stiff resistance from the police. They were subjected to baton charging as well as teargas shelling resulting in injuries on 20-25 teachers.
Such highhandedness on the part of the police has evoked sympathetic sentiments from education minister Nurul Islam Nahid towards the teachers: "We do not want respected teachers' community to be harassed for their demands." He has assured a meeting with finance minister to devise a solution. The teachers in the meanwhile suspended their programme on an assurance of a meeting with the prime minister. If this approach had been adopted earlier the trouble could have been avoided.
As a matter of fact, the institutions themselves are severely cash-trapped while the government which could ease their constraints faces fund crunch. The AL government having revived the MPO facility after six years in limbo, in fulfillment of its electoral pledge, listed 1,624 private secondary and higher secondary schools and colleges for MPO. The remainder more than 5,000 institutions being thus left out, their teachers are pressing for inclusion under MPO.
A balance needs to be struck between the government's capacity, which needs to be a bit more stretched, and the pressing nature of the teachers' demands. The government appears to have opted for a phase-by-phase approach but has not tagged it to a timeframe; that is where we believe uncertainty creeps in. The teachers' sense of insecurity can be allayed through assurances of clear-cut timeline for rendering salary support to reasonably functioning institutions. Meanwhile, some ways must be found to meet their subsistence needs.