Thousands of students were forced to stay away from schools due to the one-day strike called by the Nepal Educational Republican Forum (NERF). [break]
Hundreds of students, mainly those studying at public schools, had to return home as their schools stayed closed without prior notice. Dozens of students were seen heading for school Monday morning, only to turn back later without attending any class.
Even private schools, some of which have better communications channels for informing students about such strikes, failed to tell students not to come for Monday´s classes as the strike was just a rumor till this morning. It was only around 9 a.m. that private schools started calling or sending text messages to inform their students about the abrupt strike. By the time students got the message, some had already reached the bus stops to await school buses.
“I learnt about the strike only Monday morning,” Tek Bahadur Poudel, principal of Occidental Public School at Anamnagar, said. “I quickly called up some other school principals. They said they were making up their minds not to open their schools. So I began phoning my students not to wait for their buses. As it was already late and our office was being flooded with phone calls by guardians enquiring about the strike, we could not contact everybody. Some students waited for their buses for pretty long.”
Rajesh Khadka, president of Private and Boarding Schools´ Organization of Nepal (PABSON), says that NERF had not disseminated information properly about the strike. “There were rumors. But there was no proper information unlike in the past,” Khadka told Republica. “This is sheer negligence. The strike-enforcers treated us as a soft target simply to have their demands addressed by political parties.”
However, Amal Rai, general secretary of NERF, dismisses the charge, saying the strike was announced at a press conference. Besides, Rai said, they had verbally informed as many schools as they could about the strike. “We have not acted irresponsibly,” Rai said. “Till late Sunday night we were all for calling off the strike. We decided to go ahead with our already-announced program only after the government refused to heed our demands.”
According to Rai, they forced the school closure to press the government over implementation of a past agreement. “There are various points in our agreement,” Rai said, adding, “But we focused only on three demands: making all temporary teachers permanent through internal competition, scrapping the Company Act in the education sector, and initiating a process for appointing relief-quota teachers to permanent posts. We could have called off our strike had the government assured us on these points.”
At a meeting with NERF Sunday evening, Education Minister Ganga Lal Tuladhar promised to make 50 percent of all temporary teachers who have worked for five consecutive years permanent through internal competition. But, the talks failed as NERF stuck to its demand for making all temporary teachers permanent.
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