Chandigarh, December 26, 2019 (Yes Punjab News)
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today condemned the ruling Congress government for delaying distribution of the winter school uniforms for the second year in a row, and demanded immediate dismissal of State education minister Vijay Inder Singla for showing utter lack of responsibility besides stern action against the officials whose criminal neglect was making thousands of students suffer in biting cold weather conditions.
In a statement here, former education minister and senior SAD leader Dr. Daljit Singh Cheema said the education minister was not taking any interest in addressing the grievances of students as well as teachers and believed only in using oppressive methods and abusive language in face of any crisis in the education department.
“Recently he ordered a police lathi-charge against the protesting teachers while using abusive language against them. Not providing winter uniforms to hapless school kids in this extreme cold shows that Vijay Singla neither has a sense of duty nor any human compassion. So he should be dismissed immediately,” he added.
Dr. Cheema said that Congress government’s failure in providing winter uniforms in government schools had affected the studies of around 65,000 students . “The procurement process should have started in March to ensure delivery of uniforms to the needy students before the winter began.
But it was unnecessarily dragged to September making the timely delivery of winter uniforms next to impossible,” he said adding that the officers responsible for this grave negligence should be taken to task.
Stating that the CM Captain Amarinder Singh led government had become a habitual offender as far as implementing social welfare schemes was concerned, the SAD leader said last year also winter uniform was not distributed in time to 1.25 lakh students.
He said last year, the SAD and Youth Akali Dal (YAD) had helped those poor kids brave the bitter winter without uniforms by distributing winter uniforms in a number of schools.
Dr. Cheema also warned the Congress government against supplying poor quality uniforms to the students as it did last year. He said last year the winter uniforms distributed by the state government even at a fag end of the winter season were not only made of very poor quality but also were ill-fitting in size.
“Many parents in Mansa district had returned these poor quality uniforms to the school authorities complaining that it was the first time, they had received such bad uniforms while there was no such problem during SAD-BJP tenure. “The state government should ensure good quality made winter uniforms to poor kids as getting free uniforms was their constitutional right,” he added.
Asking the state government to abandon centralized tendering for school uniforms and let school management handle it, Dr. Cheema said that government should revert to the old time tested system of letting the school management to purchase winter uniform for the students as the current centralized tendering result in inordinate delay, mismatch of uniform of different schools and faulty distribution of uniforms.
