As a society we should mourn the death of a young man who chose death over humiliation his family may be going through.
We are living in times where technology has minimized the role of a teacher. A common teacher finds himself in such a situation where he has to prove his utility and modify his role day in and day out.
There has been a wide debate over the performance of a teacher in the school and he has always been a victim of public wrath for the dismal performance of government schools.
Though we can’t rule out his role in that, always debating one side of the story and ignoring his ordeal isn’t a fair way to follow.
I am sacrificing my life for all those families who are not paid their wages. My father is working as a teacher and he is not paid from the last two and a half years, these were last words of Shoaib Bashir, a B.Tech student who committed suicide just because he could not face the humiliation his family faced.
The tragic death of a young B.Tech student who could have been a future engineer exposes a dark side of our society and governance.
This raised some serious questions on the functioning of the administration which makes tall claims about the reformation of the education system.
There is nothing more heartbreaking than an avoidable death. Reflect on the humiliation he and his family must have suffered. This death could have not occurred only if people sitting in cozy rooms had shown some humanity.
Suicides are not only the result of depression, rather sometimes it’s the situation that is so difficult to deal with that a person finds it as an escape route.
In this particular case a teacher was appointed as Education volunteer, later converted to ReT (Rehbar e Taleem), and in 2018 when the process of conversion of ReTs started they were given the substantive posts in the state. But there were a number of teachers who were victim of our bureaucracy which on one or the other pretext created many bottlenecks to convert few hundred teachers though they were performing their duties from last more than one decade and were paid salaries during the same time. Though the Commissioner Secretary Education stated in its response Dated 16-10-2020: “Till any decision in the matter is taken by the General Administration Department the employees who are working and discharging their duties uninterruptedly are entitled for their salary which is attached to the post and can be released in their favour under rules in view of constitution mandate as enshrined under Article 21 of the constitution.There may not be any justification for denying them their legitimate dues once these employees are discharging their duties and the department is extracting work from them, they are to be paid for the same.’’
This is not the individual case. Another teacher from Boniyar, Muneer Ahmad who was also appointed as Education Volunteer and was later converted as ReT in 2014 but due to the conversion as Grade II in 2018 unnecessary bottlenecks were created and the same teacher lost his life to a deadly disease in 2021 when he wasn’t paid his salary from last two years. His family was not even compensated after his death too.
These are not isolated cases, there are many such cases where files of conversion are lying in the Directorate Education Office.Those teachers are visiting the Directorate every week but they return with the same response from the last two years. How they meet their two ends is really a serious question.
If we as a society don’t reach out to them and share their pain, who else would. The administration sitting in the civil secretariat must rise to the occasion and come up with a solution.