Visva-Bharati yet to pay June salaries

Santiniketan, whose financial system largely will depend on the Visva-Bharati, is witnessing — in accordance to academics — a “human crisis” with the college yet to pay its employees for the month of June.

Salaries in Visva-Bharati are all the time paid on the final day of each month, however the salaries for June have been yet to be launched till the night of July 10. What is stunning is that the college has not put out any round explaining the delay. Its PRO, the one official there authorised to communicate to the media, didn’t reply to requires remark.

“This is an unprecedented situation. A human crisis is building up in Santiniketan, considering its economy depends on Visva-Bharati. People have EMIs and rents to pay. Think of the elderly pensioners — how will they survive, that too in these difficult times,” stated a professor who has spent 25 years on the college. So disagreeable is the state of affairs now that an organisation known as the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights on Saturday filed an FIR on the Santiniketan police station in opposition to the non-payment of salaries. Local media is mentioning how retired lower-rung workers are left with no cash and are unable to purchase medicines.

‘Informed the PM’

Many within the campus see the delay as a fallout of the working feud between Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty and the Visva-Bharati University Faculty Association (VBUFA), which has been brazenly important of the V-C. The Union has, from time to time, written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chancellor of the college, bringing to his consideration the alleged high-handed functioning of the V-C and earlier this week had additionally raised the problem of non-payment of salaries.

According to a union member, most workers in Visva-Bharati bought much less wage for the month of May with out rationalization and when a professor sought to know the rationale throughout a web-based school assembly, he was requested by the V-C to take cost of wage disbursement. A verbal showdown between the 2 adopted and the delay within the wage was a results of that spat, the union member stated, including that the V-C, throughout one other assembly of school members held in the course of the pandemic, had brazenly ridiculed academics “for earning fat salaries while sitting at home”.

This just isn’t the primary time that salaries have been delayed. Last 12 months too, the disbursement was delayed throughout February, June and July. The cause given was lack of funds however the Education Ministry insisted that there was no such paucity and had pulled up the authorities. But that is the longest the workers have remained unpaid.