JVP takes up Uni. teachers’ battle

July 18, 2012, 10:25 pm 

By Saman Indrajith, the island

The Higher Education Minister must not allow the ongoing crisis in universities to aggravate further and must take immediate action to find answers for the grievances of university teachers, the JVP demanded in Parliament yesterday.

JVP Parliamentary Group Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, making a special statement, said that the university teachers were on a strike with four demands which were reasonable and those demands should be granted to sort out the current crisis situation in universities.

Dissnayake said the first and the foremost demand of the university teachers was for an allocation of six percent of the Gross Domestic Product for education. The government which boasts of converting this county into the Miracle of Asia has been pruning down the allocation for education since 2005. It has been cut down by 50 percent.

The total allocation for education in 2005 was 3.5 percent of the GDP. In 2011 the corresponding figure was 1.86 percent. This had placed the university system in difficulty. The teachers have expressed their willingness to shelve their demand for a pay hike, if the government agrees to increase the GDP allocation for country’s education system, he said.

Their second demand was to stop political influence in the education sector. The recent examples of ministers messing up with the country’s education system could be cited to justify their demand. The education sector must be free of government influence.

The university teachers also demand that they must be consulted in preparing the national policy on education. Any responsible government should do so without waiting till the academics ask them to do so because they are stakeholders in the country’s education and without their contribution no success could be expected in any programme implemented in the education sector, he added.

The fourth demand put forward by the university academics was to provide a solution to their salary problem. Even the higher education minister had once accepted, in this assembly, that the demand for a better salary from the university teachers was reasonable. The country’s university system needs at least 5,800 academics but has only 4,200, a shortage of 1600. Many academics have left the country. Therefore, the onus is on the government to increase the salaries of those who remained here to prevent their following the example set by their colleagues to find greener pastures in foreign universities, the JVPer said.

Higher Education Minister S. B. Dissanayake, responding to the issues raised by JVP MP, said that the pay hike demanded by the university teachers was not reasonable at all.

The Minister said that the current salaries being paid to the university teachers were sufficient as they had been given an increment recently.