Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
New Schools have been promised. New schemes have been announced education of children engaged in drudgery. Wordy acrobatics are in full display to convince people that Naveen Patnaik’s regime is committed to make every Oriya child educated.
I am not going to repeat how schools have been made the hubs of forged certificates. I am not going to repeat how the Directorate of School and Mass Education has corrupted school education and has become a sanctuary of officers who act in nexus with and protect the school teachers that forge High School certificates and how recommendations of the Board of Secondary Education for lodging criminal cases against forgers of School Certificates caught with corpus delicti in course of investigation are ignored by the authorities.
I am not going to tell how massive numbers of schools have no roof, no sanitary facilities, no playgrounds.
I am not going to inform how the schools are politically forced to stay out of teaching, as majority time of the schools get lost in arrangement of mid-day-meals.
I am not going to report how the School and Mass Education Department is not behaving as an ‘ideal employer’ as the Supreme Court has advised the public sector employers to be, because of which, more than 20,000 cases have been preferred by tortured teachers, out of which are 5000 Contempt of Court cases against the Government for not having honored the directions of the Courts as and when issued for settling the disputes the department is entangled with.
But I am going to tell you that, so incorrigibly litigant the department has become that, its Standing Counsel has resigned from the post, being pushed by the State government into a state of suffocation, where helping the Court with “effective” legal assistance as the departmental lawyer was becoming impossible.
The department is pushing the teachers and the schools into predicaments compelling them to seek redress in the Courts. But when cases are lodged and petitions are received and cases are registered and time for Government’s response is notified, the department is not advancing its counters. Around 15,000 cases are pending at the initial state, as the government has been ignoring the necessity of formulating their counters, years after years, for around fifteen years.
Suffocated to the core, with the feeling that the Government’s reluctance to end the cases as soon as possible so that the teachers and institutions shall come out of the cocoon of litigation to devote their best to education in the state, the Standing Counsel Adv. Bibhu Prasad Tripathy has tendered his resignation a few days ago.
“MY INNER SOUL IMPELLED ME TO TENDER MY RESIGNATION”, he has said the Government. He is one of the finest lawyers the State has ever produced. An alumnus of the famous National Law School of India University, Bangalore, Mr. Tripathy is General Secretary of Progressive Lawyers’ Association and a member of the State Bar Council of Orissa.
For documentation, we place here his resignation letter:
