The same cabinet meeting that approved the new pay scale for government employees on Monday, also vetoed a separate salary structure for the teachers of the 37 public universities.
According to official sources, the reason behind the veto is the financial insolvency of these state-owned autonomous educational institutions.
Public university teachers, who have been staging a movement for a separate pay scale and observing work abstentions, yesterday gave a 24-hour ultimatum for the government to implement their demand.
The Eighth Pay Commission, led by former Bangladesh Bank governor Farashuddin Ahmed, formed to recommend pay hikes for public servants, opined that there was no rationale behind having a separate salary structure for public university teachers.
The secretarial committee, tasked with reviewing the pay commission’s proposals, also agreed with the opinion.
Finance Division officials said that it is not possible to have a separate pay structure for them because the salaries of teachers of all the 37 public universities are given as assistance from the fiscal budget.
“Some sort of administrative reform must be brought to the pay structure of public university. This is because they have sought additional funds from the Finance Ministry although their salaries are given as assistance,” a ministry official said.
“If public university teachers want to have pay hikes and promotions, they should do it by generating their own incomes. This cannot be done as long as they take fiscal assistance,” the official said.
For the ongoing 2015-16 fiscal year, the government allocated a total of Tk2,684.93 crore as financial and project support for the public universities.
Of this amount, Tk1,885.71 crore is used for paying the salaries of the public university staff, including teachers, and the remaining Tk778.22 crore goes into development projects.
Ministry officials said the public university syndicates create professors and other top posts on their own without caring about spending the government funds properly.
“Even the auditor general’s office have not done any audits on the expenditures of the public universities in the last couple of years,” the official said.
“The VC of Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur gave appointment to 700 people at a time without consulting the government. Where will the government get the large sum of money from for paying their salaries?” he added.
What teachers say
Disgruntled public university teachers have claimed that once the eighth pay scale is implemented, the professors will facing degradation in comparison with the status of ministry secretaries.
They have been waging a movement since May 14 and stayed away from work on different occasions after the secretarial committee finished reviewing the pay commission’s proposals.
When contacted, Prof Farid Uddin Ahmed, president of the Federation of Bangladesh University Teachers’ Association, told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday: “All public universities everyone in the world are run with government assistance and they all have separate pay structures.
Prof Farid, also the dean of Dhaka University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, also said: “Muhith [finance minister] is now opposing this. But he himself has benefitted from the low cost of education at public universities.
“For becoming a professor, a teacher has to pass through a tough evaluation from high-powered committees. The syndicate wanted and we made someone professor, it does not happen like that.”
He also said: “In the seventh pay scale, a senior professor was equivalent to secretary. But in the new pay scale, a senior professor is treated as an additional secretary. This is outright downgradation.
“The pay commission kept it the way it was before. But the secretary-level review committee intentionally changed this to demean us,” Prof Farid said.
An official attached with the office of the finance minister has said that the minister would definitely look into the degradation claim.
University professors rejected the pay structure, terming it “shameful and discriminatory.”
Their demands include: forming a commission to fix an independent pay scale for the public university teachers; immediate revision of the eighth national pay scale; keeping senior professor and senior secretaries at equal level of payment and benefits.
Things heated up on Tuesday after Finance Minister AMA Muhith said that the teachers’ movement was a result of a “lack of knowledge” about the pay structure.
He also said that no proportions are maintained in the promotion of teachers.
After Monday’s cabinet meeting, Cabinet Secretary Md Musharraf Hossain Bhuiyan said the teachers would get their salaries as per the new pay scale and their existing facilities would not be reduced.
