Every morning in Srinagar’s Rajbagh, Jammu’s Trikuta Nagar, and scores of towns between Kathua and Kupwara, a teacher walks through a private school gate, delivers lessons that inflate institutional reputations, and returns home with a salary that would not cover a month’s ration. The school owner, meanwhile, registers another property.
This is Jammu and Kashmir’s most tolerated scandal — and it now has a directly accountable address: the elected government of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.
The J&K Minimum Wages Act — aligned with central labour codes following the 2019 reorganisation — sets a legal floor below which no employer may compensate a worker. Private school managements across the Union Territory have treated this floor as a ceiling they generously approach but rarely honour. Teacher salaries between ₹4,000 and ₹8,000 per month are common across Jammu’s semi-urban belt and the Kashmir Valley’s district towns. Trained, B.Ed.-certified professionals are being paid below the statutory minimum meant for agricultural daily-wage earners.
The Labour Department, headed by a minister who took a constitutional oath to uphold labour law, has produced no visible enforcement drive against this institutionalised violation. Its inspection machinery rarely reaches school premises. When it does, notices dissolve quietly into administrative indifference. This is not a resource deficit. It is a deficit of will — and it must be called out.
The Education Ministry in J&K regulates private school affiliations, renewal of recognition, and fee structures under the J&K School Education Act. It therefore possesses both the statutory leverage and the institutional knowledge to act. That it has done neither — not conditioning recognition renewal on minimum wage compliance, not mandating salary slip submissions as part of the annual affiliation process — is a policy choice, not an administrative oversight.
Education Minister Sakina Itoo’s department approves the very institutions where this wage violation operates at scale. The question her ministry must answer is straightforward: on what grounds does it renew recognition for schools that demonstrably violate labour law?
Private schools in Jammu and Srinagar charge annual fees ranging from ₹30,000 to over ₹1.5 lakh. Admission brochures advertise Cambridge affiliations, robotics laboratories, and CBSE toppers — results delivered by the same teachers whose provident fund contributions are often deducted but not deposited. The school is a profitable enterprise. The teacher within it remains its least audited cost and most exploited asset.
J&K has welfare boards for construction workers. It has schemes for registered artisans. It has nothing — no corpus, no grievance tribunal, no service record portability — for tens of thousands of private school teachers. A mandatory employer contribution of two per cent of annual fee collection could generate a welfare fund sufficient for health coverage, death benefits, and minimum wage enforcement across the private school teaching workforce.
The National Conference government campaigned on restoring rights and dignity for the people of J&K. Private school teachers are part of that very constituency. The Omar Abdullah dispensation must demonstrate that its commitment to labour dignity extends beyond rhetoric into the unglamorous, politically inconvenient reality of a schoolteacher’s salary slip.
Governance is measured not by promises made on podiums, but by protections extended to those who never reach one.
