The university without teachers: Karnataka's guest lecturers threaten hunger strike

BENGALURU: About 100 guest lecturers of Maharani Cluster University have been protesting for a week over a remuneration dispute, boycotting classes and warning that they will go on a hunger strike if the government does not resolve their salary-related issues immediately. Their protest is a local spark over a national rot. Guest lecturers are the people who actually teach in India's public universities: they take the regular syllabus, year after year, without the security, status or pay of university teachers. A guest, by definition, is someone who stays briefly. When thousands of such people collectively carry the routine teaching of an entire state's universities, they are not guests. They are the academic workforce, denied the wages and dignity of the job. The numbers from Karnataka are damning. Government data from June this year showed that eleven public universities in the state had no permanent teacher at all. Maharani Cluster University itself is among the institutions functioning without a single permanent teacher against a large sanctioned establishment. Across Karnataka's public universities there are roughly 1,477 permanent teachers and 3,434 guest lecturers, and in at least thirteen universities the number of guest lecturers now exceeds the entire sanctioned permanent faculty strength. The pattern crosses state borders. At Madurai Kamaraj University College in Tamil Nadu, teaching staff on consolidated pay staged a sit-in protest on Thursday over delayed salaries. The college runs on 19 regular teachers, 80 on consolidated pay and 30 guest lecturers. The staff boycotted classes, demanded a white paper on the university's financial status, and said a state government order on salary disbursement had simply not been implemented, with the administration claiming a lack of funds. More than 30 staff joined the sit-in. In both cases, the script is the same. Administrations expand enrolments, build impressive campuses and hold convocations, while the people who stand in the classrooms are hired on paper-thin contracts, paid late or paid little, and told to be grateful for the opportunity. When they protest, the first casualty is the student: classes stop, syllabi stall, and examinations loom over empty lecture halls. The Maharani Cluster lecturers have given the government a final warning. A hunger strike by the people who teach the state's undergraduates would be an indictment written in their own bodies. The demand is not charity. It is wages for work already done, in institutions that cannot function a single day without them.