Frustrated by the state government’s responses to its demands, the Meghalaya SSA School Association (MSSASA) president, Aristotle C Rymbai, today said that Education Minister Lahkmen Rymbui needs to be properly instructed on the norms and provisions regarding the SSA programme to stop him from making childlike statements.
Rymbai said this in response to Rymbui’s statement yesterday, wherein the minister said that the state government cannot regularise the SSA teachers as they were appointed by school managing committees and not the state.
Contradicting this, Rymbai said that the Union Ministry of Education (when it was still known as the Ministry of Human Resource Development) sent an order in 2015 that laid out the conditions and rules for the SSA programme.
Condition number 10 of the rules states that permanent posts should not be created under SSA but by the state government. This is so that teacher positions are guaranteed even if the SSA programme is ended by the central government, Rymbai said. The SSA programme was extended in August this year by the central government until 2026.
Other states have regularised SSA teachers and MSSASA thus does not understand why the rules are being interpreted differently by Meghalaya. Rymbai feared that the state government’s continual shifting of responsibility elsewhere is a harbinger of doom for the SSA teachers when the programme ends in less than five years’ time.
Meanwhile, with regards to the pending five months’ salary of the SSA teachers, the teachers’ leader said that it appears as if Rymbui is completely confused.
“We suggested that the government should release the Rs 104 crore that it has not released for the past three years so that all the pending salaries of the SSA teachers are cleared but Rymbui is talking about contingency funds of Rs 80 crore,” he said, adding that the state government should come clear on why it has still not released the Rs 104 crore that is meant to bridge the gap between the funds the Centre sends the state and the actual SSA teacher salaries.
