Retd LNMU teachers allege harassment

Madhubani: The administrative chaos prevailing in Lalit Narain Mithila University (LNMU), Darbhanga, is hitting the retired teachers hard. The instant case is one of apparent overstepping of his powers by the financial adviser (FA) of the university. Payment of earned leave (EL) amounts of hundreds of retired teachers stands stalled owing to the specious objection by the FA.
Sources in the university said the vice chancellor, under whose administrative control the FA is supposed to work, prefers not to assert his authority by overturning the FA's objection and provide relief to harassed teachers.The issue relates to the strike of university and college teachers of the state for 131 days from August 1, 2000 to December 9, 2000. While teachers of all other universities of the state got their salaries of the strike period after they compensated the teaching loss by engaging extra classes as mandated by the state government, the LNMU teachers were not so lucky. Rather, they were in for a greater shock.
The successive university administration adopted an allegedly vindictive approach. Not only the teachers were denied the salaries of the strike period despite having compensated the teaching loss, but were also penalized by adjusting the strike period absence of 131 days from their EL at the time of their retirement. This led to a situation in which the retiring teachers incurred heavy financial loss as their salaries at the time of their retirement was much higher than what they would have got during the period of strike.
This led to great resentment among the LNMU teachers who launched a sustained agitation under the banner of Lalit Narain Mithila University Teachers Association (LNMUTA), which finally culminated in a notification by the university on August 12, 2015 on the basis of recommendation of the syndicate of the university in its meeting on February 13, 2015, and also approved by the Senate on February 16, 2015. The notification provided that "the period of strike of teachers shall be treated as extraordinary leave without pay and 131 days shall not be adjusted from the EL at credit of a teacher who participated in the strike.
"The relief to the retiring teachers, however, was short-lived. The present FA has started refusing to grant approval to the EL credited to a teacher reportedly on the ground that the grant of extraordinary leave was inadmissible. As a result, files of hundreds of retiring teachers pertaining to EL calculation and approval are pending in the university. Teachers of LNMU retiring since January, 2015 till date are still awaiting payments of their gratuity and EL amounts," said a source.
Condemning the high-handed intervention in a matter already settled by the syndicate and the Senate of the university, LNMUTA president Dr Chandra Mohan Jha advised the FA to go through subsections 6 and 7 of Section 12A of Bihar State Universities Act, 1976. "The Act provides that the FA can raise his objections to a proposal having financial implication only before the proposal is put before the syndicate and not after it has been okayed by it," he said.