The college teachers in Manipur plan to wear black badges from Monday (November 29) till December 4 as a mark of protest against the State Government’s failure to implement the 7th UGC pay scale within the deadline of November 27, according to a statement issued by the Federation of Government College Teachers Associations.
The college teachers have been agitating for a long time for the enhanced pay scale. From time to time memoranda of understanding were signed resulting in suspension of agitations. However, the college teachers say that the Government failed to translate the assurances into concrete actions.
The statement said that if the Government did not issue the necessary orders after the black badge protest they would launch a sit-in protest from December 6 to 9 on their college campuses and would take mass casual leaves for two days from December 10. If there was no positive response, the teachers would boycott classes, both online and offline, from December 13. The boycott would continue till the 7th UGC Pay Slips were issued.
The teachers say that it is the seventh agitation on the issue since 2019. In the Northeast, the Governments of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh had already implemented the 7th UGC pay scale in 2018, they say. The Manipur Government had implemented the recommendations of the 7th pay commission for other employees in 2019. Stating that it was discriminatory, the teachers say that even allowances had not been paid to them for the last 10 years.
