SHILLONG, Jan 15: All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) state president, Charles Pyngrope on Saturday said the government should pay the SSA teachers before paying the legislators.
“They (government) should pay the teachers first and the legislators last,” Pyngrope told reporters reacting to the SSA teachers’ protest demanding the release of pending salaries.
Stating that paucity of funds has been a serious problem for every government, Pyngrope said, “As we discussed in the Assembly in 2018, if we could have a good fiscal management team, not necessarily with the bureaucrats or the legislators but a proper team drawn from different walks of life.”
He said the team should be competent to advise the government on how to increase revenue without having to resort to means that may be dangerous to public life or the environment.
“Fiscal management is not the domain of every person. There are people who are experienced and helped governments in the past on how to generate revenue without having to resort to any unfair means,” the AITC state chief said.
By unfair, he meant things that are not fair to the environment and the society.
The SSA teachers were demanding the release of their pending salaries of five months. Later, the state government released salaries for August and September but the teachers said this would not help mitigate their sufferings and continued with the protest demanding the release of salaries of the remaining three months.
They asserted that their non-cooperation movement against all government programmes and activities and the “letter campaign” to the Chief Minister and the Education Minister will continue.
They will follow up the programmes with a peaceful and democratic black flag and sit-in protest and a candlelight vigil on January 21.