Taking serious note of the poor plight of entire education system in Punjab, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today held SAD-BJP and Congress responsible for such a worse situation and claimed that education was never on priority for previous as well as current regimes in Punjab.AAP MP and Chairman of the Campaign Committee, Bhagwant Mann stated that SAD-BJP and Congress have virtually ruined the government educational institutions and to benefit private institutions it deliberately neither made appropriate recruitment nor took any step to improve the structure of education system.On the name of improving the education, these parties just laid foundation stones of new colleges, Mann added.Several vacancies of teachers are laying vacant in Government colleges and even after the intervention of Punjab & Haryana High Court, State Government did not make any efforts to fill these vacancies, Mann said adding that as a result of Government’s apathy majority of government colleges do not have permanent faculty.
Poor plight of the education system could be gauged from the fact that an illiterate Akali leader Tota Singh was installed as Education Minister and teachers who are demanding jobs, being beaten mercilessly by police on the instruction of Akali Minister like Sikander Singh Malooka, AAP MP claimed.Mann said due to acute financial crunch, prestigious Government Colleges and Universities like GNDU, Amritsar and Punjabi University, Patiala and Punjab Agriculture University (PAU) were unable to impart the quality education to students.“Education and Health is on the top priority of AAP and after coming to power, by providing ample budget to these sectors, standards of government schools and colleges would be upgraded on the pattern of Delhi”, Mann said adding that government teachers and principals would be sent abroad to attain special training of new techniques in the field of education, so that government institutions could be benefitted out of it.