New Delhi: The Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP government has written to the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University to accommodate the teachers and employees whom it had not very long ago called “ghost employees”, the varsity teachers claimed.
Disappointed with the Delhi government for not receiving their salaries for the last several months, the teachers submitted that “the government should first arrange for their pending salaries and then talk about accommodating the new staff”.
Most of the teachers believe the move is a part of the Kejriwal government’s strategy to seek votes of the ad-hoc teachers for the Delhi University’s Executive and Academic Council elections.
The teachers said that the ad-hoc teachers in the colleges funded by the Delhi government were yet to receive the arrears of the 7th Pay Commission while claiming that for the last three years, the ad-hoc teachers did not receive payment for medical bills, LTC, apart from the child education allowance.
Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia in a letter to Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh has expressed concern over the displacement of nearly 70 per cent ad-hoc and temporary teachers during interviews for the post of Assistant Professors in colleges, calling for permanent recruitment of ad-hoc teachers.
Reacting to Sisodia’s letter, Delhi University teachers’ organisation ‘Forum of Academics for Social Justice’ said: “Delhi government earlier used to call these teachers and staff ‘ghost employees’ but now it has written letter to the V-C to accommodate them.”
The teachers, meanwhile, have urged the V-C to write to the Delhi government to clear their salaries, payment of arrears, leave travel concessions (LTC) and medical bills.
A total of 28 colleges affiliated to Delhi University are funded by the Delhi government. Of these, 12 colleges that are 100 per cent funded by the Delhi government have been facing financial crisis.
The teachers claimed that there have been instances of shortfalls and delays in receiving grants in the last three years, which eventually led to non-payment of their salaries for the last four months.
The professors of Maharaja Agrasen College — also affiliated to Delhi University, on Friday expressed their ire against the Delhi government for not receiving salaries by polishing shoes on the footpath.
Meanwhile, Prof. Hansraj Suman of Delhi University has expressed disappointment over Sisodia’s letter, saying: “The Minister should first accommodate thousands of guest teachers engaged in the Delhi government schools and then think about these 28 colleges.”
More than 7,000 guest and ad-hoc teachers have been working in Delhi government schools for the last decade.
High up in Mallorca’s spectacular Tramuntana mountain range, the picturesque village of Deià is a Mediterranean idyll that has been a magnet for artists and bohemians for more than a century.
There is no beach to speak of nearby, which has served to keep the crowds at bay. Its problem now is that only millionaires and billionaires can afford to live there.
“It’s still attracting creative people but now they have to have money,” says the Chicago-born ceramicist Joanna Kuhne, who has lived in Deià since 1980. “They come here to relax and they don’t want to integrate or they don’t know how to. Their life is somewhere else.”
Ceramicist Joanna Kuhne in her studio. Photograph: Stephen Burgen
Local people have been priced out. It’s not that there’s nowhere to live – the two estate agents in the village have plenty of homes on offer for upwards of €2m (£1.75m) – it’s rather that people in the Balearic Islands, where the average monthly salary is €1,598, have been thoroughly priced out.
As such, while poverty is driving the depopulation of rural areas on the Spanish mainland, Deià and dozens of villages like it in the Balearics are being depopulated by wealth.
The regional government is fighting back, with a request for European approval for a law that would ban anyone not resident in the islands from buying property.
This has been interpreted as a ban on foreigners’ buying property but that is not the case in Deià, where foreigners, mostly from the UK and US, make up around 37% of the population.
“It’s not about people’s nationality, everyone is welcome. It’s how they plan to use the houses,” says Deià’s mayor, Lluís Apesteguia. “What we want is people who plan to live here. We don’t want people buying second homes, nor do we want speculators.”
It was the English poet and novelist Robert Graves, who settled in Deià in 1929, who put it on the map as a place of pilgrimage for artists and writers.
Robert Graves with his second wife, Beryl, and children outside their home in Deià. Photograph: Daniel Farson/Getty Images
“Even when my father arrived there was already an artists’ colony of German and Catalan painters,” his son Tomás says. “In fact, he initially rented from an American woman.”
The charcoal industry had gone into decline, leading to massive emigration. As a result, houses were cheap to buy or rent.
When mass tourism arrived in the 1960s, the colony of foreign residents opposed any sort of tourist development.
“That was the first rift between the locals and the foreigners,” says Graves. “The foreigners didn’t want any more building and the locals saw what was happening elsewhere and wanted some for themselves.”
“Back then Mallorca was paradise,” says Carmen Domènech, who moved to Deià from Barcelona in 1974. “It was a refuge for artists, poets and intellectuals.
“There was a good relationship between the locals and the foreigners. You could sit in a bar and Julio Cortázar [an Argentinian novelist] would be at the next table. It was all very natural and it was a proper village with a butcher and a fishmonger.”
Things began to change in 1987 when the Virgin Group boss Richard Branson obtained planning permission to build la Residencia, originally conceived as an artists’ retreat but in reality a luxury hotel.
La Residencia in Deià. Photograph: Tyson Sadlo
“The rot set in with the arrival of Branson and that’s when I became an activist,” Domènech says. “The argument went that, thanks to Branson, lots of money would come to the area and everyone would have a job. Nearly all the village was against me because I opposed it.”
Graves says house prices rocketed “once the Residencia started to attract art consumers rather than art producers”.
Prices also rose when, under a bylaw passed in the 1980s, any new houses in Deià had to be built of stone, thus making them much more expensive.
Branson sold the hotel in 2002. It is now owned by Bernard Arnault, the boss of the luxury goods firm LVMH, and currently the world’s wealthiest man.
Francesca Deià, 63, has lived in the village for most of her life. She recalls what it was like growing up with such a cosmopolitan crowd in what was a very conservative and Catholic place.
A street in Deià. Photograph: Alex/Getty Images/iStockphoto
“To the older generation, the people who came here were like aliens and our parents wanted to protect us from the all the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll,” Deià says.
“I feel enriched that I was able to grow up with all these different nationalities and learn to speak English – and Welsh. The people I grew up with and their children are still here and they all speak Mallorquin. But nowadays I don’t see that happening much. There is less integration.”
Her Welsh partner, Dai Griffiths, says: “It’s curious that often artistic and bohemian types say they feel freer in rural, conservative places than in the city. It’s as though the linguistic and cultural barriers are a plus because they don’t feel a need to engage with the people around them. The village is just a backdrop.”
Apesteguia, who describes himself as “pathologically optimistic”, says the EU needs to be flexible and recognise that the islands are a special case, “otherwise villages such as Deià will cease to exist”.
“The Mallorca population is increasing while here in Deià it’s falling,” he says. “A village without a stable community isn’t a village, it’s just a group of houses or a tourist resort.”
Aside from a small supermarket, nearly all the shops have gone and GP services have shrunk from four days a week to two hours.
“It’s a ghost town and a theme park,” says Domènech.
Apesteguia is inclined to agree. “Tourists came here because it’s authentic,” he says. “But now it’s not.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
