Islamabad : There seems to be no end to ad-hocism at the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) in near future as the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, instead of filling the top post of the directorate regulating government schools and colleges in the Islamabad Capital Territory on a permanent basis, has made a college principal its acting director general.
Through a notification, the ministry’s Education Wing has tasked Islamabad College for Boys G-6/3 principal Dr Ali Ahmed Kharal with acting as a stand-in for the permanent FDE chief. He will hold the additional charge of the office for a period of three months or until it is filled permanently by an official from within the FDE or colleges.
Interestingly, the development comes a day after Dr Kharal, a BPS-21 (timescale) official, was transferred to the G-6/3 degree college from the Islamabad Model College for Boys, I-10/1, an intermediate college. Under the rules governing the appointment of the FDE DG, if the appointee is to be from among college principals, he or she should be the principal of a government degree college.
And Dr Kharal’s posting to the G-6/3 degree college was made to fulfil that formality.
The BPS-21 official held the office in past but relinquished it on the Supreme Court’s orders for not ever heading a degree college. The senior most college principal in ICT, he was reportedly not posted to the degree college earlier for being regarded with disfavour by those calling the shots at the erstwhile Capital Administration and Development Division and FDE.
The FDE recruitment rules declare the top FDE post ‘purely a promotion post’.
Under them, either the senior most FDE director of BPS-19 or the principal of a degree college (BPS-19) should be promoted to the DG’s post if he/she possesses second class master’s degree with five years teaching/administrative experience in BPS-19 in case of direct recruitment or second class master’s degree with 12 years teaching/administrative experience in BPS-18 and above or second class master’s degree with 17 years teaching/administrative experience in BPS-17 and above.
In this light, there is no room for the appointment of BPS-20 principals as the top FDE boss as they have already got BPS-20 and cannot be promoted as the DG for being in the same scale.
The FDE, the regulator for Islamabad’s over 420 public sector schools and colleges, has been functioning without the head since the temporary DG, Hasnat Qureshi, relinquished the charge over a month ago.
Qureshi, a BPS-20 bureaucrat of the Pakistan Audit and Accounts Service group, had acted as a stand-in for the permanent FDE DG for more than a year due to the erstwhile CADD’s policy of ad-hocism towards public sector education in Islamabad.
Instead of filling the top vacancy on a permanent basis, the division kept posting its one officer after another or outsiders as the interim FDE chief causing unrest among the directorate’s own staff members.
Dr Shahnaz A Riaz was the last permanent FDE director general, who had retired in December 2016 on attaining the age of superannuation.
Though there’re reports that the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, which took the administrative control of the FDE post the CADD’s abolition lately, is understood to be in the process of filling the post on a permanent basis, many believe that Dr Kharal is likely to temporarily hold the office for a long time like his predecessors due to infighting among FDE directors over seniority issue.
The teachers welcomed the development saying for being in the field as a college principal, Dr Kharal knows the real issues and challenges of the education system and will formulate pragmatic corrective measures to further the cause of education in the capital city.