Why Teachers' Associations Need to be Militant fighters for Economic Demands
We are salaried . We are employed, to carry out policies mostly decided by bureaucrats and imposed on us. We need a trade union that will look after our interests. Our predecessors, in very difficult conditions, did build such a union. That was the WBCUTA, and later, at the all India level, the AIFUCTO. Locally in Jadavpur we have had the JUTA. But for these organisations, with all their flaws (d iscussed below, a few of those) we would be having neither any academic democracy, nor a decent living. My father, who was a WBCUTA leader, with no Ph D (though eventually 15 or so books and over a hundred papers) so I assume in the eyes of professors with foreign Ph Ds little better than a rabble rouser, always told me about the time the first demand on their charter read, A monthly Pay Packet. I never asked what he meant, for my childhood years are filled with memories of my father coming home with an armload of books and the comment, today I got my UGC. To me, UGC meant father getting a re