MULTAN: The employees of South Punjab Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education Multan, Bahawalpur, and Dera Ghazi Khan have rejected the proposed plan to eliminate the nine Punjab boards and have announced strong resistance to the plan.
Speaking at a joint press conference here at Multan Press Club on Friday, the Punjab Boards Employees Associations chairman Malik Nisaar Ahmed said that the people are aware that nine boards of education are working across Punjab and their offices are working at divisional headquarters. All the boards of education are responsible for holding matric, inter and linguistic exams and issuing certificates to the successful candidates.
He appealed to the new Punjab chief minister Maryam Nawaz to review the impractical and unrealistic decisions of the former Punjab caretaker government.
Only the Lahore Board was set up in the beginning in Lahore, later education boards were established in Multan, Sargodha and Rawalpindi due to population influx and providing facilities to the people at their doorstep. The government had established education boards at divisional headquarters. The education boards include Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan, Bahawalpur, Sahiwal, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Layyah and Gujrat.
The Associations chairman Malik Nisar Ahmed said that the former caretaker government designed the policy to protect their vested interests and introduced the plan to establish only one education board in Punjab by eliminating the rest of all the education boards.
The plan is not practicable. Even the concept of a central education board is not introduced in Sindh, KP, Balochistan, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan. There is only Punjab where the impracticable plan was introduced by the former Punjab caretaker government.
Malik Nisar said In Punjab, all nine education boards are autonomous and generate their own funds.
The Board of Governors will be dissolved, and the offices of chairmen and secretaries will be abolished to form a single education board. All funds will be transferred to the central board, affecting examination systems, fees, and other matters.