No Salary for 5 Months, East Delhi Teachers Approach Court Seeking Transfer of Control to Govt

Teachers in East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) schools have not received their salaries for the last five months. Since it has been so long and they haven’t received a favourable response from the EDMC, the teachers filed a petition in the Delhi High Court on May 5 to order the municipal corporation to pay the overdue payments.

According to the petition, filed by advocate Ashok Agrawal, if the EDMC is unable to pay the salaries, the teachers have asked the court to order them to hand over control of all their schools to the Delhi government.

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News agency ANI reported that the petitioners have argued that shifting these schools to the Delhi government would not only assure regular payment of salary to teachers but would also result in a significant increase in educational standards.

The petition is expected to be heard by the high court on Monday. The plea says that EDMC has 365 elementary schools with a total of 5000 teachers. It alleged that the EDMC did not pay the salary of any of these teachers from December 2021 to April 2022.

The teachers are having difficulty paying their household expenditures, children’s school fees, and various EMIs due to non-payment of salaries.

The teachers claimed that the EDMC’s inefficient operations had created an artificial financial emergency, allowing them to avoid or postpone paying salaries to their employees.

The plea claimed that EDMC’s primary schools are bound under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009. It argued that under Section 7 of the RTE Act, 2009, the central government and the state governments are jointly responsible for providing finances to carry out the Act’s requirements.

The petitioners in their plea claim that if schools are transferred to respondent government of NCT, it would not only ensure payment of salaries to its employees but also there would be remarkable improvement in standard of education. Nearly 1 lakh students presently study in 365 EDMC primary schools.

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