Rarely, if ever, has an announcement by Mamata Banerjee been welcomed by the Left. The teachers’ lobby of the leftist parties has overwhelmingly endorsed the Chief Minister’s decision to raise the age of superannuation of college and university teachers from 60 to 62 — an emphatic bow in the direction of the senior citizens, as often as not the bedrock of the faculties.

Equally and perhaps still more crucially, she has quelled the controversy and ended the uncertainty triggered by the ebullient education minister, Partha Chatterjee’s imprimatur that all teachers on extension be retired across the universities in West Bengal.

Unmistakable is her implicit message to the education minister — “There is no end to education and no age for teachers to retire. Like doctors, they teach till their death.” Her statement is a faint echo of Jyoti Basu's take when he was nudging 90 as Chief Minister — “Communists never retire.”

Jadavpur University was the first casualty of the education minister’s fatwa when the extended tenure of three important teachers was discontinued… much to the detriment of pedagogy — a loss for a centre of excellence that had even figured in the VC’s address to the convocation on December 24. That fatwa was issued with scant regard for UGC regulations.

By attempting a halfway-house, the Chief Minister has now cleared the position hopefully for the greatest good of the greatest number… both in terms of the teacher and the taught. No less critical is the imperative to fill the vacancies at the level of teachers — from the primary to the post-graduate levels.

The stark deficit in the teacher-student ratio isn’t the bane of the primary segment alone; the deficit, rooted in repeated fiascos and the government’s sluggish approach, has affected the search for learning generally. Hence the lament of a Vice-Chancellor of a leading university — “Improving infrastructure alone will not help in achieving excellence. We need to improve the teaching-learning process.”

There is nothing particularly novel in granting a 25-month study leave for research; the praxis has always been integral to the academic schedule of the faculties. Arguably, what need not be so integral are the frequent seminars and junkets abroad… with the pay and perks intact at home.

The striking feature of Saturday’s cache of welfare measures is the social sector benefit, specifically to include teachers in the West Bengal Government Health Scheme. But the retired teachers would appear to have lost out in the bargain not least because retired personnel, irrespective of the department they had served, are entitled to the benefits of WBGHS and its central edition, CGHS.

On closer reflection, the Chief Minister’s bouquet was unwittingly a budgetary exercise after her finance minister, Amit Mitra’s ranting at the Prime Minister’s New Year’s eve address.