Bhubaneswar, June 3: Nurses and nursing students today staged a demonstration near the Assembly over the education criteria for staff nurse recruitment at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)'s Odisha branch here.

The agitating nurses and nursing students said an advertisement had recently been issued for the recruitment of 800 nursing staff members for the institute. However, the minimum educational qualification has been fixed at BSc (Nursing) instead of the traditional General Nursing and Midwifery (GNM).

"Consequently, this minimum criterion bars nursing students who have graduated from the three government schools, various private schools and premier institutes across the country, from applying for the post," said Sekh Khalil Ulla, one of the agitators.

The agitators said several all-India hospitals, including AIIMS's Delhi centre and railway hospitals had kept GNM as the minimum educational qualification for the recruitment for staff nurse posts. "But strangely, there has been an exception here and the GNM course has not been recognised," said one of the protesters.

A delegation of agitators met health minister Pratap Jena and submitted a memorandum seeking his intervention in revising the educational criteria for the recruitment in staff nurse posts for AIIMS, Bhubaneswar.

To compound the misery for the state government, school teachers also announced the launch of a long-term agitation in protest against the state government's "anti-education" and "anti-teacher" policies on the same day.

Leaders of the School Teachers' Federation of Odisha threatened that they planned an indefinite agitation to procure their rights.

"We are determined to wage a do-or-die battle till our genuine demands are met," said chief convenor of the federation, Prakash Chandra Mohanty, while addressing a news conference after a teachers' convention.

"The education sector in the state has been in total disarray. Teachers and headmasters have not been recruited for years. The situation is so dire that games teachers are being compelled to take science classes," said Mohanty.

"Schools, which have been eligible for grant-in-aid over the past 20 years or so are being deprived," a federation leader alleged.

The federation has been demanding full grant-in-aid to schools and abolition of giving token grants in the name of block grant. "Though the government had promised to fulfil our demands during our prolonged agitation in 2015, they have not taken any steps to do that till now," the leaders of the federation said.

"We are, therefore, compelled to hit the streets once again after the summer vacation," said Mohanty, adding that a long-term action plan had been prepared at today's teachers' convention.