17 govt colleges in state without regular principal

Sarbjit Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 17

Of the 48 government colleges in the state, 17 are without a regular principal. Against the sanctioned 1,875 posts of regular lecturers, only about 800 have been employed. In such a scenario, government colleges are being virtually run with the help of part-time lecturers. Besides these, there are teachers who are paid from the parent-teacher association (PTA) fund collected from students at the time of admission.

A meeting of the Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) to promote college teachers as Principals was held on September 23. But even after three months, no promotion has been ordered.

Out of the 17 vacant posts of Principal, 15 are to be filled by promotion and two though direct recruitment.

“Why are the authorities not promoting eligible college teachers to principals? Why is the government not giving them their due,” asked Jaipal Singh, general secretary, Government College Lecturers’ Association.

“In the absence of Principals and regular lecturers, the academic atmosphere in government colleges has almost collapsed,” he alleged.

“The government is not bothered about setting things right,” he said. If the situation continues, within the next four years, most of the government colleges would be without regular lecturers, he claimed.

The post of the DPI (Colleges) belongs to college lectures. However, for the past two years, since the retirement of Jaswinder Singh Brar, the government has not posted a DPI from the college cadre. Gurpal Singh, who retired recently, was posted only for four days due to technical necessity of making him eligible for drawing pension. Earlier, after promotion, he was posted in the Punjab Text Book Board but not as DPI (Colleges).

“There is a lot of resentment and disappointment among college lecturers as the government has been denying them avenues of promotion to the post of Principal and DPI,” said Jaipal Singh.

He said there were 32 government colleges without librarians in the state. Out of 96 posts of librarian, only 26 had been filled. He said college teachers working against the regular posts were being paid from the PTA fund only in Punjab and nowhere else.