Justice for Aspirants and Contract Teachers: Rethinking the Contract Assistant Professor Debate in Nagaland

Imti OzukumKohimaThe issue over contractual Assistant Professors in government colleges in Nagaland has entered a decisive phase. The High Court in its recent judgement did not cancel the latest extensions of the appointment, but it barred further extension of the contractual appointments. This ruling appears to have shed light on a pathway towards closure of the issue. Yet the issue may be far from closure because the issue does not end at barring further extension. It raises one question with obvious answer and another question with not so obvious answer. The first is: whether the state can repeatedly appoint and retain people in public employment without open competition and prescribed qualifications. The answer to which is obviously no. And the second is: what should justice look like for teachers whom the state itself recruited and kept, who have taught generations of students, often for many years, on far lower pay and weaker job security than regular teachers? The current public discourse treats these questions as contradictory. This need not be the case since the controversy is not really a contest between “deserving aspirants” and “undeserving contractual teachers”. But it should be understood as a result of a dysfunctional public-employment and higher-education system that has put two vulnerable groups of educated citizens against each other.The important position taken by NNQF is its insistence that public employment cannot become a closed system since it violates the foundational principles of equality and non-discrimination enshrined in Article 14 and 16 of the Indian constitution. In a state like Nagaland where economic dependency is high on government job while other alternatives remain very limited, the stake is unusually high when competing for limited public resources. A government job is therefore not just a job but one of the few reliable routes to economic security and status. However, the dire state of employment economy in the state does not mean negating constitutional provisions. With respect to higher education, the University Grants Commission (UGC) framework does not prescribe contractual hiring as a free alternative to regular recruitment. Instead, the provision for contractual appointments is prescribed under specified circumstances with conditions: limits on their number, qualifications and selection procedures equivalent to regular posts, prescribed pay, and restrictions on duration and review. The NNQF is thus right to ask a basic question: if public employment is a public resource, why should some citizens occupy it without others getting the same opportunity? That question should not be simply brushed aside.However, an argument that receives less attention, or is conveniently ignored, is that equal opportunity cannot be reduced to an aspirant's right to displace a working teacher. It does not follow that every contractual teacher is morally answerable for the system that hired them. Nobody who accepts a contract can be expected to foresee that the government will renew it for ten or fifteen years, and that the arrangement will later be found constitutionally questionable. The state created the arrangement, renewed it, benefited from it, paid the teachers and used them to keep its colleges running and eventually it became dependent on them. It is therefore hardly the case that these teachers as people who “took” jobs from qualified aspirants, but they occupied positions that the government itself created and administered.The sharpest criticism therefore should be directed towards the state. If colleges needed faculty, why were permanent posts not created and filled through proper channels? If temporary hiring was truly necessary, why were the UGC conditions not followed? If teachers were needed year after year, why was a stopgap allowed to become a de facto permanent staffing system? And if the arrangement was unlawful, why was it not resolved years ago? In this case the contractual employment was used as a structural substitute for regular recruitment, but this is not what temporary employment is meant to be.Furthermore, public attention and consequently the discourse is largely focused on Articles 14 and 16, but far less attention has been paid to the economic relationship between the state and its contract teachers. Saying that “they are paid and have no right to complain” is just being ignorant to the nuances of the issue and a blatant disregard for the principles of equal treatment and dignity of life. The UGC framework is clear that fixed emoluments for contractual teachers should not be less than the monthly gross salary of a regular Assistant Professor. The High Court noted that these teachers were paid well below that, reportedly not even one-third of a regular teacher's gross salary. The lack of impartial examination of the issue therefore creates a paradox where the state is rightly criticized for ignoring UGC norms on how it recruits, but quietly sweep under the rug the norms concerning fair compensation to contractual teachers. If UGC compliance is a principle, why are the recruitment rules treated as binding while the pay safeguards are ignored? Institutional rules and regulations, and principles of fairness and justice cannot be invoked partially. Doing so is neither fair nor just, and does not create a pathway towards solving the issue, especially in the context of Nagaland.Contractual Assistant Professors are often considered as privileged because they hold “government jobs”. It is true that the position begets status, but it would be folly to equate them, in any other sense, with regular Assistant Professors on full government pay and benefit. A person with years in the classroom may have spent decades or more building an academic career while remaining insecure. Calling for blanket removal of this teacher obscures the ethical and labor relationship not only with the state but with the Naga society in Nagaland where for years their labor has been exploited to keep the system running and educating the same students who now seeks to dislodge the contractual teachers in the name of fairness and equal opportunity. To “dislodge” may not be their intention with ulterior motive, but that is the obvious desired outcome. This issue is deeply unsettling and perhaps that is exactly the reason why the NNQF and its supporters refuses to see or acknowledge the issue in a holistic manner. This does not weaken the NNQF's position on recruitment but it exposes an imbalance in the debate. If their labor is to be considered as expendable then NNQF, CTAN and everyone in between have no business talking about fairness, rights, and equality. But if their labor is not expendable then how do we address the risk of making them expendable if the aspirant's demands are met. Uncompromising focus on recruitment norms and preventing absorption of the current contractual teachers without addressing any of the other issues amounts to denial of their dignity and accepting that their labor is expendable. The current movement cannot simply remain silent and ignore that real risk. The point here is not about total absorption but finding a middle ground without sacrificing one for the other.It is concerning to see that justice is being treated as a zero-sum game, with one side arguing that if contractual teachers continue, qualified aspirants lose their right to equal opportunity. That concern is legitimate. On the other hand, the other side of the argument is that if teachers are removed without regard to the conditions of their employment, their years of service and their economic vulnerability, another injustice is created. And that too is a legitimate concern. Naga youth spending years in acquiring education and preparing for government recruitment has real ground for frustration, and that anxiety should not be trivialized. But contractual teachers also should not be painted as a cause of unemployment in Nagaland. Many aspirants feel a sense of denial and unfairness that contract teachers still occupy the position they now aspire, the same contract teachers who taught them. That the same position be now up for contest. Such feelings are sentimentally powerful and captures a genuine generational frustration but is thoroughly misplaced and misguided. A teacher whose former student later becomes qualified is under no obligation to step aside, and the student's qualification does not make the teacher an illegitimate occupant. Such a framing turns an institutional problem into a personal conflict between generations. Instead, an important question that the aspirants must raise is; after all these years why are contract teachers still kept under such precarious condition with insultingly low compensation? The exploitative condition under which these teachers serve should register as a serious concern especially to someone who aspires to enter the higher education system. A teacher should not be humiliated because a former student becomes a qualified competitor. Nor should the student's aspiration be dismissed because the teacher has served for years. The clash is between competing claims created by a defective system, not between the moral worth of contract teachers and aspirants.Many have realized by now that the issue at hand is not straightforward, but that is not an excuse to have endless debate. The line has to be drawn somewhere. Sympathy has limits, and so must scrutiny. Sympathy for contractual teachers cannot become a defense for unqualified appointments. If someone lacked the minimum essential qualification when appointed, that is a serious problem of academic-integrity. Requiring them to acquire those qualifications later only showed that the state meant to retain them, not to treat the posts as genuinely temporary. Long service does not retroactively create a qualification that did not existed. Therefore, the cases need systematic and transparent assessment. Consequently, the same standard must be applied consistently across the board. If UGC norms are used to condemn the present contractual hiring, their rules on pay and conditions for contractual staff deserve equal weight. If Article 16 is invoked to protect aspirants, the same concern should drive scrutiny of every practice that denies citizens their rights and dignity. Selective constitutionalism is not constitutionalism.Perhaps the most constructive feature of the high court judgment is that it does not simply revoke or order all contractual teachers out. The Court seems to have considered the practical consequences to avoid disruption in the current academic process. If that is true, then this judgement too cannot become an excuse to buffer the current academic process to a smooth finish and then discard the contract teachers. Constitutional correction, in other words, need not mean administrative cruelty. The system can be set right while recognizing that students need teachers and that the contractual teachers also need a reasonable transition.What the current discourse need is rejecting the extreme positions that; all contractual teachers must go; and, all contractual teachers must be regularized. A better position, I believe, should be; irregular recruitment must end, but correcting it must not become an excuse to ignore the rights, labor, and dignity of those whom the state itself recruited and retained to serve our institutions. This, I believe, is what fairness and justice should mean. It should mean equal opportunity to compete, but also no exploitation or humiliation of people after years of service. It means academic qualifications matter, and that full-time academic work should come with proper pay rather than a fraction of the normal salary. It means respecting Article 16 without letting constitutionalism become a tool by which one group of educated citizens legitimizes its claims while ignoring the real vulnerability of another. The issue at hand is a crisis of institutional governance, not a morality play of good aspirants and bad teachers. The government let temporary posts become permanent in practice, failed to create and fill posts on time, and benefited from cheap academic labor. The real injustice is making two groups of educated Naga youth fight over a problem neither created.