Teachers shut down schools across the country for the second consecutive day on Monday protesting against, as what they called, unnecessary use of force by the police to break up their “peaceful protests”.

Both community-run (also called government/public school) and private schools have been closed by teachers affiliated with Nepal Educational Republic Forum (NERF) and Nepal Teachers’ Union (NTU) today.

The closure of schools on Sunday and Monday has directly affected more than eight million students in around 33,000 schools nationwide, according to some reports.

The teachers have been organising various protest programs since the past few years demanding permanent status to all temporary teachers working in government schools by completing certain procedures and granting of facilities to all private school teacher at par with their colleagues in government schools.

As part of their nationwide protest program, the teachers organized sit-in protests in front of all the District Education Offices (DEOs) across the country on Sunday. Earlier, they had called students to take classes on Satruday, a weekly holiday.

They also organized protest rallies and staged a sit-in in front of the Ministry of Education at Kesharmahal in the capital before clashing with security personnel on Sunday.

Police arrested some 200 teachers from the MoE premises and released them later. Few teachers were also injured in the police action and were admitted to the hospital for treatment.

Meawhile, the Ministry of Education has called the nationwide protests organised by teachers and closure of schools as meaningless when the government has already promised to address their demands. nepalnews.com