Chandigarh: AS Naura is new PUTA president

Panjab University’s (PU’s) biochemistry department chairperson Amarjeet Singh Naura was elected as president of the Panjab University Teachers Association (PUTA) for the second time in a row. Out of 549 votes polled on Tuesday, Naura bagged 287 votes. There are 590 registered voters in the association this time. Three of the four top positions were bagged by his group.

In a close contest, Naura beat Ashok Kumar from Hindi department who bagged 244 votes. Meanwhile, 18 votes were declared invalid.

His team’s Mritunjay Kumar, who is an assistant archivist at the AC Joshi Library, also won the general secretary seat for the second time in a row. Kumar received 288 out of the total 549 total votes. Kulwinder Singh of University Business School, in the menwhile, bagged 246 votes. A total of 15 votes were declared invalid.

Surinder Pal Singh of mathematics department, also from the same group, bagged the joint secretary post with 293 votes polled in his favour. Before 2023, the Naura-Mritunjay duo had been in command of PUTA last in 2020. Mritunjay was then the president and Naura the general secretary.

This time, the teachers’ body election was a two-cornered fight against the Teachers Voice United Forum (TVUF). TVUF had contested last year as well but had not won any seat. This time, Suruchi Aditya of the PU dental institute got 286 votes as opposed to Simran Kaur of the evening studies department who received 247 votes. 16 votes were declared invalid.

For the post of joint secretary, Surinderpal Singh of mathematics department was elected with a total of 293 votes. For treasurer, Deepak Kumar of University Institute of Engineering and Technology won with a total 305 votes.

For the executive body, from group 1, Nitin Arora, Khushpreet Brar, Gautam Behal and Sumedha Singh were elected. All are from the Naura group. For Group 3, those elected include Neeraj Aggarwal, Deepak Gupta, Amita Sarwal and Ikreet Singh. Out of this Ikreet Singh is from the Ashok Kumar group while the other three are from Naura group. For the executive group 5, Kuljeet Kaur Brar was elected. All members in groups 2 and 4 were elected unopposed and belong to Naura group. Keshav Malhotra was also elected in this category for the eight consecutive time.

This year the group unofficially called the Navdeep Goyal group did not contest as they were reportedly supporting the TVUF. One of the Goyal group’s core members, in a message, expressed concern about PUTA’s working with the authorities last year and raised issues with how they dealt with retirement age of teachers in the syndicate and senate.

Earlier this year, members had walked out from a PUTA meeting and had also refused to pay their membership fee, alleging nothing had been done during the whole year. The association, in a statement, had said the members had attempted to sabotage PUTA by walking out of the executive meeting. After the election, however, Naura said the body is for all teachers and they must come together to work on issues for their collective benefit.