Jactto-Geo agitation: Lessons from an unresolved protest

It has been five days since S. Shanthi* resumed duty at a government middle school in Erode district, after she and her colleagues took the call to go along with the decision to withdraw the indefinite strike spearheaded by the Joint Action Council of Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Organisations and Government Employees’ Organisations (Jactto-Geo).
A sense of failure that their protests ended without a solution to any of their nine demands and guilt that some of her colleagues are still in jail for the agitation, play on her mind. “Do you know that we didn’t ask for a pay hike as is being projected to the public by the government? Either the government didn’t even understand what we asked for, or it deliberately misled the general public,” she says.
Shanthi’s is one of the middle schools that the State government was planning to merge with a few other schools in the district. “One of our demands was only against this kind of merger. When multiple schools are merged, the post of headmaster in all the schools will be abolished and there will be only one headmaster for five or six schools,” she claims. That would put many people out of work.

More videos

See All