Chandigarh, July 7
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) senior leader and Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Punjab Assembly, Harpal Singh Cheema has strongly condemned the atrocities committed by the police on the protesting non-permanent unemployed teachers in Mohali. He said that use of tear gas shells, water cannons and cane charging on jobless teachers; leaving at least 10 of them, including women injured, was reprehensible on the part of the Captain Amarinder Singh-led Congress government. In a statement issued from the party headquarters here on Wednesday, Harpal Singh Cheema lashed out at Captain Amarinder Singh-led Congress government stating that without any further delay, the teachers who had been working in Punjab government schools for almost a decade and a half, on meager salaries should be regularised immediately.
Cheema said that education providers like AIEs, EGS, STRs, and other temporary teachers had devoted most of their lives to government schools and worked for a salary of only Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000. He said that earlier during the tenure of the Shiromani Akali Dal government, these teachers were left in the lurch and now the Captain government of Punjab had been reluctant to regularise the rightful demand and even hold a meeting for a long time. Cheema reminded Captain Amarinder Singh that before the elections, he had visited a protest in Mohali and promised to regularise the services of teachers in the very first cabinet meeting when his government came to power. But Captain has reneged on its election promises and had neither regularised the contractual employees nor increased their salaries, he added.
Taking a dig at Captain Amarinder Singh, Cheema said that even after a lapse of four and a half years, the educated youth and contractual teachers of the state were still being persecuted by the Captain government, which had betrayed the people with their false promises and on the other hand Captain Amarinder Singh was busy fitting the ‘political dilemma’ instead of resolving the current issues of the state. He said that a government that cannot respect teachers was doomed to collapse. Cheema said that there had not been a month since the Captain’s government came to power, in which the teachers seeking employment and regularisation had not endured the atrocities.
The AAP leader said that the Captain government had abolished thousands of government vacancies in the name of restructuring the departments instead of giving jobs to the unemployed or regularising the temporary employees. Cheema demanded Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh to listen to the grievances of the protesting unemployed and contractual teachers sympathetically. He said that in the 2022 elections, the people of Punjab would take stock of the false promises made by Captain Amarinder Singh and will give him a befitting reply.
