Ten days after Rahul Bhat, a Kashmiri Pandit, was killed in his office by militants, the Jammu and Kashmir administration on Saturday transferred 56 Pandit employees to safer educational institutes in Srinagar.
An official said the transfers ensured that the working Pandit couples were either posted in one educational institute or nearby to each other. Most of the teachers working in volatile parts of the old city have been transferred to uptown localities.
All these teachers were recruited under the Prime Minister’s Return and Rehabilitation scheme announced by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2008 for migrant Kashmiri Pandits who left the Valley in 1990s. A total of 3,841 Pandit employees took up jobs under the scheme, which is mandated to recruit 6,000 educated migrants to bring their families to the Valley. Besides the scheme, hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits have opted for government jobs in the Valley in the past few years.
