Hat-trick for new PUTA president Rajesh Gill

Amarjot Kaur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 21

In a first, Prof Rajesh Gill, a Senator and Syndic, has been elected as the president of PU Teachers’ Association (PUTA) for the third consecutive year.

A total of 589 faculty members turned up at PU’s Law Auditorium to vote for the post, the contenders for which were Prof Gill and Dr Jayanti Dutta. Winning by a margin of 75 votes, Gill bagged 323 votes while Dutta garnered 248 votes. The total number of invalid votes is 187.

All elected PUTA office-bearers, including secretary, vice-president, joint-secretary and treasurer, belong to the Gill’s clique and so do the executive members, except Mohammad Khalid from Dutta’s group. Khalid, former PUTA president and PUTA secretary, contested from Group IV and won by a margin of 28 votes, defeating Assistant Prof Simran Kaur, a first-time contender.

The new office of PUTA will have JK Goswamy resuming his former position as the association’s secretary, winning by 148 votes, and Mritunjay Kumar, who bagged the post of vice-president, by a margin of 143 votes. Supinder Kaur has been chosen as the PUTA joint-secretary, after defeating her contender Shivani Sharma by 49 votes, and Amandeep Singh, who won by a margin of 57 voters, is the PUTA treasurer. The new executive members of PUTA are Suman Sumi (359 votes), Guldeep Singh (325 votes), Amritpal Kaur (311 votes) and Mohammad Khalid (297 votes).

Expressing gratitude to her team members, Prof Gill, who will retire from professorship in September 2021, said it was her team that persuaded her to contest the elections this year. The Seventh Pay Commission, she shares, tops her priority list. “The Vice-Chancellor has been dillydallying on the matter of the Seventh Pay Commission and it is the first issue we will take up this time,” she says.

Gill said the issues of women faculty assume a place of significance in her team, which she shares, is gender-balanced. “We had nominated nine men and nine women from our team. I believe in equality and with more women executive members, we keep abreast with women-related issues, like child care leave that was resolved this year. We also root for gender equality in different PU committees too,” she said.