Teachers, students and parents bodies against NDA

A joint forum of teachers, students and parents on Monday vowed to mobilise voters against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the run-up to the Assembly polls in five States this year and the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

Speaking at a national convention here, they slammed Modi government for its various policy decisions taken on education since 2014, saying those decisions not just have led to "extreme alienation and unrest" among the higher education students and teachers but also "denied" the right of country's children to free and compulsory education.

"We have already started reaching out to people in different parts of the country. We have to mobilise parents, students and all other stakeholders to save education and educational institutions from persistent attacks," organising secretary of the All India Forum for Right to Education Vikas Gupta said, addressing the event.

Partha Sarathy, general secretary of the All India Federation Of Retired University and College Teachers' Organisations, called for teaching "a lesson" to the NDA in the upcoming elections.

"We have to bring them down from power by mobilising people at the grassroot level," he said while addressing the convention.

Office-bearers of other organisations, speaking at the event, also called upon for "mobilising voters" against the NDA in the run-up to elections.

The national convention, which was jointly organised by as many as 10 pan-India bodies of teachers, students and parents, including the Federation of Central University Teachers' Association, All India Secondary Teachers Federation, saw 15 more organisations joining the joint forum "to steer a larger struggle for a secular, democratic, scientific and inclusive public-funded education system in country".

On the conclusion of the event, the forum passed a resolution to build "a mass movement" of all stakeholders in public-funded education and campaign across the country "to restore public trust, equity, access, scientific temper and constitutional values in education".

"The public policy on education has tended to ignore the social goals of justice, equity, access and quality at all levels of education. The HRD ministry and regulatory bodies of the Union government are actively aiding communalisation of education and violent expression of communal ideas in university campuses to sow the seeds of division within the academic community," the resolution, adopted at the convention, noted.

The joint forum, which vowed to campaign against the Modi government during elections, decided to hold a massive protest and demonstration in February 2019 to highlight "its failures and brazen attacks on educational institutions", the organisers of the convention said.