The Madras High Court on Thursday called for the counter affidavit of the Tamil Nadu government to a public interest litigation petition that insisted on the providing of rent-free residential quarters for teachers of all government and private schools and colleges in the State.
A vacation bench of Justices C.V. Karthikeyan and Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy granted four weeks’ time for the filing of the counter affidavit to the PIL petition moved by advocate M. Purushothaman, who also insisted on the allotment of public land for the construction of these quarters.
Apart from his plea with respect to residential quarters, the litigant wanted the Centre as well as the State government to provide subsidies to teachers for purchasing houses, and also wanted banks and financial institutions to be directed to provide interest-free housing loans to them.
In his affidavit, the petitioner said, during the COVID-19 pandemic, middle class families dependent on private schools were shaken. While the plight of the parents grabbed the attention of everyone, the misery undergone by the teachers at these schools did not receive any attention, he complained. He claimed that many private schoolteachers were forced to do the job of fee collection agents during the pandemic and that many private school managements took advantage of the plight of the teachers, who were paid paltry amounts of salaries to justify the collection of tuition fees.
The advocate said that in most schools, primary schoolteachers were paid anywhere between ₹10,000 to ₹15,000 a month and only reputed schools paid ₹25,000 to teachers of higher classes. In rural schools, the situation was worse and even in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools, the consolidated pay was only ₹20,000, he claimed.
Though the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) guidelines require maintenance of a teacher-pupil ratio of 1:30, many schools admit as many as 60 children in every section thereby collecting huge amounts of money with multiple sections in each class, but pay a pittance to the teachers, the litigant said.
Mr. Purushothaman further claimed that if the government at least opens up education as a purely commercial venture, then many corporates in the country might enter the budget schooling sector and provide better education at an affordable cost to the middle class and the downtrodden. At present, he said, “the plight of the teachers of private schools is very pitiable. The managements, who keep on expanding into education empires never care about the welfare of the teachers. Traditionally, teachers in our civilization were revered as Gurus and provided with land, materials, amenities and facilities,” he said.
Therefore, affordable housing was very essential for teachers to have peace of mind, he argued.
