Students protesting over the rollback of the two-tier Teacher Recruitment Examination-4 (TRE-4) on Thursday gave a call for a Raj Bhavan march on August 22 to express solidarity with PhD scholars and researchers who have been agitating for 17 days, demanding the withdrawal of proposed new recruitment rules for assistant professors. Separate groups of students are also pressing for the filling of vacancies for music teachers and librarians.

“We have given a call for a gherao (encircling) of the Raj Bhavan or Lok Bhawan on August 22. Research scholars, guest teachers, and students from all universities and colleges across Bihar will arrive in Patna in large numbers. The march will begin from Veer Kunwar Singh Park at R-Block and proceed peacefully to the Lok Bhawan,” said Kumud Patel, convener of the All Ph.D. Holders and Research Scholars Association of Bihar.

This will be the second Raj Bhavan march call within a week, coming days after Leader of the Opposition Tejashwi Prasad Yadav led a student protest march on Wednesday demanding accountability for the use of an AK-47 during the July 25 agitation against the NEET paper leak in Siwan. Tejashwi also supported the students’ demand for a single tier TRE-4, for which applications for 32,388 vacancies are being invited from September 1.

Ph.D. scholars and researchers have a six-point charter of demands, chief among them the implementation of UGC Regulation 2018, Table 3A, in the recruitment of assistant professors. Table 3A evaluates applicants across various academic and professional achievements on a 100-point scale, rather than selecting candidates solely on the basis of written tests or arbitrary screening criteria.

This will be the second Raj Bhavan march call within a week.

Key demands

Researchers are also demanding that the maximum age limit for the assistant professor appointments be raised from 43 years to 55 years. The state government recently advertised vacancies for contractual assistant professors.

Other demands include making assistant professor recruitment in Bihar’s universities permanent and regular, implementing a domicile policy for such recruitment, halting the infringement on the autonomy of Bihar’s universities and colleges, and granting guest assistant professors — who have been serving in Bihar’s universities for years — the benefit of service regularisation until the age of 65 before regular appointments are made.

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Dilip Kumar, a student leader, said: “It is now not just about the TRE-4 two-tier exam rollback, but also about the demands for filling long-pending vacancies across several departments. As of now, we are focusing on the August 22 Raj Bhavan march.”

Gardanibagh, the designated protest site located less than a kilometer from the Bihar Assembly, has been witnessing a convergence of student groups raising multiple demands — one seeking an immediate notification to fill long-standing vacancies for librarians, another demanding that vacancies for music teachers in schools and colleges be filled immediately.