In what came as a shock to nearly 100 teaching and non-teaching staff at various campuses of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) across India, they were informed that their contracts will not be renewed and their services end on June 30.
On June 28, the TISS administrations sent termination letters to the staff.
“Nearly a hundred institute staff members which were previously funded by the Tata Education Trust will become unemployed after years of service at TISS. It is completely a failure of the current leadership of TISS administration in running the institute and apathy of the BJP-led Union government,” said a statement by Progressive Students’ Forum of TISS.
“After repeatedly targeting its students and curbing the campus democracy, the present TISS administration, under the BJP-led Union government, has unleashed an attack on its employees as well,” the statement further said.
The mass termination is set to create a scarcity of teaching and non-teaching staff. “As students, we express our concern about this decision. The previous years’ NIRF data shows that the student-faculty ratio is being impacted negatively. This means that the currently employed faculty is insufficient in terms of the number of students admitted to TISS each year,” the statement said.
While the termination of a hundred such positions will directly impact the futures of the students who are enrolling in the Institute, it might also allow for politically-motivated appointments in the near future, the students feared.
TISS, a premier institute in existence for nearly 90 years, through the contribution of its faculty and staff has achieved a distinct status as a social science institute. Last year, the BJP-led Centre took over TISS, making it a fully ‘public-funded institute’.
“The result has been that students are facing delays in receiving student aid and are being threatened in the name of fee payment. While becoming a public institute should have relieved the pressure from students coming from economically and socially marginalised backgrounds, the Central government takeover has resulted in added monetary pressures,” the statement added.
The latest move of robbing around 100 teaching and non-teaching staff at the institute of their jobs highlights the BJP government’s ‘anti-education’ and ‘anti-TISS’ stance, the students have alleged.
“The BJP-led Central government and the current TISS administration are directly responsible for taking away the livelihoods of nearly a hundred employees and putting the future of its students also at risk. The recent blunders made by the Ministry of Education in conducting nationwide entrance examinations only add to the incompetence of the Central government,” the statement said.
The Progressive Students’ Forum has demanded that the TISS administration immediately revoke the mass termination and make necessary arrangements with the Union government and the University Grants Commission (UGC) to take responsibility for those previously employed under the Tata Education Trust.
The Forum has also demanded that alternatively, the government must hold urgent discussions with the top management of the Tata Education Trust to reinstate funding for these positions so that all jobs are protected.
