Separate cadre for ReT teachers okayed

Tribune News Service
Jammu, December 9

The State Administrative Council (SAC) on Sunday approved the transition of the Rehbar-e-Taleem (ReT) as regular teachers and creation of a separate cadre for them.

The council, under the chairmanship of Governor Satya Pal Malik, acted on the recommendations of a committee, which had proposed an action plan for streamlining the teaching cadre in the state.

The committee was constituted on August 13 and submitted its recommendations to the government recently. It was mandated to devise a comprehensive strategy to review the issues of all teachers in the school education department, including those funded under the ongoing Centrally sponsored scheme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and suggest possible solutions.

Under the new separate cadre, ReTs, once shifted to general line teachers’ cadre, will get the pay scale of Rs 29,200-92,300 (L-5) under the 7th Pay Commission from September 1, 2018, in the school education department.

The cadre has been created exclusively for the purpose of adjusting ReTs and will gradually get abolished over a period of time.

In this regard, the school education department will amend the J&K School Education (Subordinate) Service Recruitment Rules, 2008. The action plan envisages formal merger of 526 posts of headmasters and 3,132 posts of subject-specific masters created under the RMSA and creation of 28,363 supernumerary posts of teachers.

To implement the action plan, the government has decided to withdraw all vacancies of lecturers and teachers referred to the Public Selection Committee and the Service Selection Board.

The action plan will enable meeting the salary deficit of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and RMSA teachers, which is over Rs 1,400 crore per annum, out of the state Budget.