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Chandigarh: PUTA polls set to witness two-cornered contest this year
The incumbent panel of AS Naura as president and Mritunjay Kumar as general secretary will be in contention for the same posts this year also
As per the final list of candidates released on Friday, Panjab University Teachers Association (PUTA) polls will witness two-cornered contest this year.
The incumbent panel of AS Naura as president and Mritunjay Kumar as general secretary will be in contention for the same posts this year also. Naura’s competition will be Ashok Kumar of the Hindi department.
Kumar was also the presidential candidate last year. Ashok Kumar and others had formed a new group under the name “Teachers voice united front” to contest the elections.
Last year, Naura with 237 votes had beaten Rattan Singh (229 votes) from University Institute of Legal Studies by the margin of eight votes. Ashok Kumar from the Hindi department had bagged 81 votes.
However, last year was a three-cornered contest, while this time the whole Navdeep Goyal group has decided not to contest the elections. As per Goyal, they want PUTA to work unitedly for all teachers. But he alleged that the president and secretary made sure that PUTA was not able to function. He further alleged that only a couple of executive committee meetings were held and only one general body meeting during the whole year. He added he didn’t want to give the impression that they were trying to capture power like the other team by contesting the elections.
Last year, Mritunjay Kumar, assistant archivist at the AC Joshi Library, won the general secretary seat with a margin of merely two votes. Kumar got 223 out of the 539 valid votes. Kashmir Singh of biotechnology department secured 221 votes and Kulwinder Singh of University Business School bagged 95 votes. This year also the contest is between Kulwinder Singh and Mritunjay for the post of secretary.
There will be 569 voting members for the PUTA polls this year which will be held on September 3.
