After Amit Kumar, another removal demand in Meghalaya has cropped up. And this time, the target is Vijay Mantri, a senior bureaucrat who is at the centre of the education debate.
Mantri is the Commissioner and Secretary of Meghalaya’s Education Department. The Voice of the People Party, or VPP, has demanded Mantri’s immediate removal, arguing that the way the Education Department is being handled has created uncertainty among teachers and raised concerns over education policy, service conditions and accessibility.
However, while VPP is demanding that Mantri should go, the Meghalaya SSA Schools Association, led by its president Aristotle C. Rymbai, has come out in his defence and called the demand unfair.
So, what exactly is behind this demand?
The VPP’s demand is not based on one isolated decision. Party president Ardent Miller Basaiawmoit has pointed to a series of education-related policies and their implementation — particularly the Structured Pay Framework, the welfare of teachers in deficit grant-in-aid institutions, service conditions and school rationalisation.
According to VPP, these policies have created uncertainty among teachers and raised questions about the accessibility and quality of education.
The party has also argued that Meghalaya cannot approach education simply through bureaucratic rationalisation and numerical efficiency without taking into account the State’s geographical, social and local realities.
In other words, the VPP’s criticism is broader than one administrative order.
It is questioning the direction of education administration under the present system and whether policy decisions are sufficiently sensitive to teachers, students and communities.
The party has, therefore, put the responsibility directly on the Commissioner and Secretary and demanded a change in leadership.
But there is another side to this story. That is teachers defending Mantri.
The Meghalaya SSA Schools Association has rejected the VPP’s demand.
Its president, Aristotle Rymbai, has argued that Mantri is being singled out for decisions that are ultimately taken by the government. Rymbai says Mantri has been accessible to teachers and has been working towards reforms in the education sector. He has specifically defended the Structured Pay Framework, pointing out that SSA, ad hoc and other categories of teachers have spent decades working on fixed salaries without adequate job security.
According to Rymbai, the framework is intended to link salaries with length of service and provide greater protection to teachers.
He has also pointed to the extension of Contributory Provident Fund benefits.
But Rymbai is not saying that everything is perfect. He has acknowledged that the framework needs improvement, while arguing that such changes should come through dialogue between the government and stakeholders rather than through demands to remove an individual officer.
And this creates an interesting contradiction. The political opposition says the policies are creating uncertainty. A teachers’ association says the policies may need improvement, but the officer implementing them should not be made the scapegoat.
One of the most important issues behind the current debate is the long-running dispute over the Centralised Provident Fund for teachers and employees of deficit grant-in-aid institutions.
This is not a new controversy. The case began in 2017 and eventually reached the Supreme Court. In August 2022, the Supreme Court remanded the matter back to the Meghalaya High Court with a specific mandate: the High Court had to examine whether the State had implemented the Meghalaya Non-Government School and College Employees Centralised Provident Fund Act, 1969, and, if not, to what extent.
The State subsequently notified the Meghalaya Non-Government School and College Employees Centralised Provident Fund Scheme, 2026, on March 18, 2026. But the petitioners objected to the new scheme.
The argument was that the 2026 scheme had moved away from the framework that had been discussed during the earlier court proceedings.
Among their objections was the introduction of an NPS-based defined contribution structure, the treatment of employees who joined before and after April 1, 2010, under a common framework, and changes to the Board of Trustees.
The petitioners argued that these changes were not permissible within the statutory framework and departed from the process that had earlier been considered by the court.
Now lets see what did the High Court actually says.
This is where the latest court order becomes important — and where the political debate needs to be separated from the legal finding.
The Meghalaya High Court did not examine whether every feature of the 2026 CPF scheme was good or bad. Instead, the court focused on the limited scope of the Supreme Court’s remand. The High Court held that it could not travel beyond the specific directions given by the Supreme Court. It found that the State had substantially complied with the 1969 Act through the creation of the Centralised Provident Fund framework and notification of the 2026 Scheme.
Therefore, the writ petition was disposed of.
But there is an important qualification.
The High Court specifically left the petitioners free to challenge the architecture and investment model of the 2026 Scheme through a fresh legal proceeding.
So, the order does not mean that the court declared every objection to the 2026 scheme legally invalid.
It means those broader objections were not adjudicated in that particular proceeding because of the limited remand mandate.
That distinction matters.
For teachers, provident fund is not merely an administrative policy. It concerns retirement savings, financial security and long-term service benefits.
For the government, implementing a uniform and financially sustainable framework across different categories of teachers is an administrative challenge.
And for the opposition, the question is whether the government’s reforms are adequately considering the realities faced by teachers and educational institutions in Meghalaya.
That is where the VPP’s criticism of the Education Department becomes broader. It is connecting the CPF issue with the Structured Pay Framework, service conditions and school rationalisation to argue that there is a larger problem in the way education policy is being designed and implemented.
But why Mantri specifically?
This is perhaps the central question.
Education policies are government policies. They involve the political executive, the department, senior officials and multiple stakeholders.
Yet, VPP has chosen to demand the removal of the Commissioner and Secretary.
The party’s position is that the manner in which the department is being handled under Mantri has become a source of uncertainty and that the department needs leadership that listens more closely to teachers and local communities.
The government’s side, however, has a different argument.
Education Minister Lahkmen Rymbui has defended Mantri, describing him as a hardworking and accessible officer who listens to concerns even if he cannot resolve every issue immediately.
Rymbui has also rejected the suggestion that Mantri alone should carry responsibility for policies approved by the government.
That argument is echoed by Rymbai.
A silver lining is that the education department on September 17 withdrew its August 12 notification that allowed filling up of State Pay Scale vacancies through the Structured Pay Framework. VPP has also welcomed the decision.
Nonetheless, the controversy has opened up a debate that must have a conclusion for the department and the system to function without jeopardising the future of both teachers and students. The debate is over who gets to define education reform in Meghalaya — the government, the bureaucracy, political opposition, or the teachers and communities who ultimately experience these policies on the ground.
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