Letter To Editor: Long Service Little Relief For Trainers In Kashmir

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer) Kashmir's vocational trainers live the cost of bureaucracy. Years of service, long travel, and personal sacrifice carry no weight when transfers demand they start from scratch. Experience disappears behind rigid rules.

Vocational education began in J&K in 2016 under Samagra Shiksha. Trainers came through Vocational Training Partners, a structure whose role still lacks clarity even after ten years. Accountability often shifts between offices, but one fact stays clear.

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Trainers carry the programme every day. They teach classes, guide students, build industry links, and keep the system running.

I have served at BHSS Safapora in Ganderbal since 2016. Nearly ten years have passed at the same station. During this time, vocational education changed course many times. Policies shifted, support stayed thin, and certainty remained rare.

Trainers built the programme as it grew, adjusted to constant change, and accepted long travel, distance from home, and personal strain. Many held on to one belief. Years of steady service would earn recognition.

That belief now feels uncertain.

Vocational education has expanded. New schools have been allotted to District Srinagar, which is also my home district. Common sense suggests that trainers who have served for years should receive priority to move closer to home. Instead, the system asks them to apply again, as if ten years of continuous service left no record and value.

This raises a basic question: What place does experience hold in today's administrative thinking?

Forcing a trainer to start over after a decade at a distant post treats unequal service conditions as equal and turns uniform rules into lived injustice.

Transfer policies exist to balance institutional needs with human realities, rather than erase long service through rigid procedure.

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The solution lies in a clear, transparent framework that rewards years of service, considers the hardships faced, and brings new institutions into the fold. What this moment calls for is recognition than reform.

If vocational education aims to strengthen skills and jobs in Jammu and Kashmir, the trainers who deliver it must fall within the circle of fairness.

Ten years of service should not end in invisibility. Policy must respect continuity, and expansion must include those who carried the system this far.

A solution exists. The harder question is why it still waits.

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