Urdu teachers climb water tank to press for demands

LUCKNOW - In a protest inspired by a Bollywood film, half a dozen qualified Urdu teachers, including three women, climbed atop a water tank just across the Uttar Pradesh assembly complex here and threatened to jump off if their demands are not conceded.

“Our repeated appeals to the government to grant Urdu teachers parity in pay scales with the basic education teachers has fallen on deaf ears, so we have no option but to give up our lives by jumping down from this water tank,” said Hisam Uddin Siddiqui, president of the Muammil Urdu Association, who is one of the six teachers.

“Every time we have met people in the government, we have been assured that our demand would be looked into sympathetically, but nothing appears to have been done so far, so where do we go?” lamented Siddiqui. He said there are as many as 5,000 such teachers across the state.

Hundreds of teachers gathered in support of the agitators and raised anti-government slogans.

The administration has sought assistance of the army to get them down from the 50-feet high water tank.