When I first stepped into the academic hierarchy as the junior-most lecturer, I was officially designated as a “Contractual Lecturer.” For this title, I was paid a meagre Rs 8,000 per month that renders to a shocking Rs 266.6 per day calculated across 12 months, amounting to Rs 96,000 annually. Since, I was unmarried at that time, I managed to survive somehow, carrying only a few domestic responsibilities on my shoulders. Whether willingly or unwillingly, I kept teaching at different institutions within the higher educational setup for a decade under this depressing financial umbrella. Then, all of a sudden in 2020, I was renamed as a “Lecturer on Academic Arrangement”—a bureaucratic nomenclature as bizarre and synthetic as IUPAC chemical nomenclature, existing nowhere else in the length and breadth of our country.

The Illusion of a Raise and the Winter TrapAfter years of consistent requests, delegation meetings, memorandum submissions, street dharnas and peaceful protests organized jointly by senior and junior scholars, my remuneration was finally enhanced to Rs 28,000 per month by the bureaucratic bosses at the helm. It was framed as a grand goodwill gesture—one for which my colleagues, my family and generations to come are expected to be perpetually indebted. I briefly rejoiced, calculating that I would finally earn Rs 933.33 per day.

However, the jubilation was short-lived. Under the newly minted rules accompanying this raise, I was thrust into a trap disguised as an administrative order. Not only was my winter salary for........

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