Engineering colleges forcing us to work amid pandemic, says staff body

HYDERABAD: Claiming several engineering colleges were forcing teaching and non-teaching staff to attend paperwork during the pandemic, Telangana Technical Institutions Employees Association (TTIEA) members have requested officials to initiate action against those managements violating the Epidemics Diseases Act, 1897 and AICTE orders.
They said the managements were harassing staff and threatening to sack them if they fail to attend colleges. “The managements are harassing both teaching and non-teaching staff during the pandemic to attend college and do National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) works. As per the government as well as AICTE orders, college should have been closed until July 31 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, colleges are threatening to withhold salaries or sack if anyone fails to attend colleges. To save their jobs, staff have no option except to follow management orders,” TTIEA president V Balakrishna Reddy said, adding about 50-60 engineering colleges in the state were forcing staff to attend work daily.
They alleged that colleges were taking zero precautions — no sanitisation, no temperature checks, no masks, no sanitisers, among others.
The college managements, meanwhile, said that it was not against norms to use the services of their faculty. “Colleges have the right to use the services of their staff, especially, when their accreditation will be reassessed this year. Autonomous colleges will lose their status if they fail to get their accreditation reassessed,” said KVK Rao, general secretary, All India Federation of Self-Financing Technical Institutions, adding that colleges were taking all precautions against Covid-19.