DUTA PRESS RELEASE: 12 OCTOBER 2017

The DUTA welcomes the Union Cabinet’s long overdue decision to approve Pay Revision for University and College Teachers. It urges the Union Govt to immediately approve the pay revision of the non-teaching employees of the Universities and the colleges without any further delay to mitigate their financial hardships to some extent.

The Cabinet decision can only be appreciated or responded to in its entirety when the details of the decision are communicated in full, through Gazette Notification. As of now, the DUTA continues to view the Government’s secrecy in decision-making with skepticism and apprehension. University and College Teachers are apprehensive about the long list of pay-related anomalies that had arisen from the previous Pay Revision and are yet to be resolved. The DUTA also appeals to the Govt to release the Dearness Relief for pensioners at the earliest since it has not been released for the last two installments.

Teachers are also apprehensive about their service conditions that have been altered to their detriment in the last Pay Revision, with the introduction of the Academic Points Indicators (API) for Career Advancement and Promotions. The API system has denied Promotions to the largest section of teachers and has encouraged a rat-race for points, with disastrous consequences for the standards of higher education.

The negative turn in service conditions during the last few years is also indicated by the loss of teachers’ parity with Group A services in terms of Pay and Emoluments, and the devious attempts made by the UGC to downsize faculty by increasing the number of lecture-hours per week per teacher. Such moves will worsen the student-teacher ratio in university departments and colleges, leading to a further decline in the global rankings of our institutions.

Since the resolution of anomalies and service-conditions are necessarily aligned to Pay Revision, any judgement about the benefits of this Pay Revision will be based on incomplete and hasty inferences unless the final details about anomalies, pay parity and service conditions are allowed to emerge.

The DUTA urges the UGC and Government to transparently finalize all details to the satisfaction of the teaching community and in the interest of quality higher education, at the earliest.