Sushama Yermal The education sector is the main creator/developer of human resources in the society. Ironically, the idea of managing human resources as well as human relations, as prevalent in the corporate sector, is surprisingly entirely absent from academia in India! Having been used to this situation, people have developed a mentality of simply bearing with the troubles and moving on, because in their experience, there is no reasonable forum where their complaints are heard, and the chances of getting timely help are even more remote. At present, teacher grievances are addressed to some extent by tribunals, officers in the departments of education and courts of justice. Clearly, a dedicated forum for this purpose needs to be established at the appropriate scale. The profession of teaching involves a number of responsibilities in addition to classroom interactions with students. Teachers are held accountable for student scores, student behaviour, school reputation, involvement of local public in school activities, maintaining school documents in addition to student data, interacting meaningfully with parents, providing information requested by officials in the department of education, ensuring that all students get their due share of participation in co-curricular events and competitions, counselling students on various issues – not the least on career choice and so on. Due to the nature of human interaction involved in each of these activities, teachers often face conflicts that are hard to resolve by mutual agreement. Also, a teacher’s job is not always given its due in terms of professional autonomy, security, adequate pay scales, appropriate working conditions, facilities in terms of leave, leisure or retirement benefits, to name a few. When an individual teacher or a group of teachers feel that they are treated unfairly or are not given their rightful dues as promised by the employer, they need to address these grievances to the competent authority to settle the dispute justifiably. This article looks at the avenues available for such redressal of teacher grievances in India. The basic working/earning rights of all citizens of the country are readily available to teachers. As workers in a public service, most of the labour laws also apply to the education sector of employment. A handy list of these rights can be found in the article “Teachers and the law” published in Teacher Plus, February 2009. Though we hear about and see many problems faced by teachers, usually no strong teacher unions come forward to fight for their rights, unlike the worker organizations in other sectors. The absence of a