Sindh govt pays protesting teachers with violence

KARACHI: Police baton charged teachers protesting over non-payment of their salaries since their appointment in 2012, as they attempted to march on the Sindh Assembly from the Karachi Press Club on Thursday.
The law enforcers also arrested around 25 teachers, while 10 of the protesters were injured when the cops tried to stop them from advancing on the provincial legislature.
Two months ago the then school education secretary Abdul Aziz Uqaili had promised representatives of the unpaid teachers that the issue of their salaries would be resolved by November 16. After Uqaili’s transfer on October 7, his replacement, Dr Iqbal Durrani, also assured the unpaid teachers that he would continue the policy of his predecessor and resolve their issue.
In 2012 the then education minister Pir Mazharul Haq had appointed around 6,750 employees in the Sindh Education & Literacy Department. Four thousand teachers and 2,000 lower staffers were from Karachi, while the remaining belonged to Ghotki, Sanghar, Sukkur and Khairpur.
According to the representative organisation of the unpaid teachers – the New Teachers Action Committee (NTAC) – the education department had ensured the recruitments against vacant posts on the basis of merit. However, claimed the NTAC, none of them was ever paid and they were forced to stage demonstrations every month.
NTAC Chairman Abu Bakar Abro said the Sindh government had issued a notification for conducting the scrutiny of the appointees again, following which a committee was formed. The body was headed by former Karachi schools director Niaz Ahmed Laghari, while Hamid Karim, the present director, and Asghar Memon, teacher training institutions additional director at the Sindh Bureau of Curriculum & Extension Wing, were its members.
The committee’s report cleared 3,600 and declared 1,600 untrained. The scrutiny body maintained that the employees were appointed as per the set criteria advertised by the provincial government.
However, the then education secretary Fazlullah Pechuho, now health secretary, rejected the committee’s report, following which 234 of the staffers filed petitions in the Sindh High Court (SHC).
The SHC verified their documents and 10 of them were deemed fit for their jobs, while the remaining cases were forwarded to the Sindh Service Tribunal. Abro said that some of the employees rejoined their duties in the light of the tribunal’s decision, but the rest of them were denied reappointment and salary.
He said they were assigned duties in the 2013 general elections and the population census held this year, but the provincial government unjustly refused to pay their salaries.
Meanwhile, MPA Nusrat Sehar Abbasi said violence against female teachers was a shameful act on the part of the provincial government, which harked back to the days of dictatorship. She criticised PPP chief Bilawal Bhutto Zardari for tweeting over a minor protest in Punjab but keeping mum over his own party’s government in Sindh. She demanded of the chief justice of Pakistan to take notice of the violence against teachers.
‘Education dept bribed’
Sindh Education Minister Jam Mehtab Dahar admitted that the education department was “bribed to hire teachers in dozens in 2012, some of whom are not even acquainted with the Arabic language”.
He also admitted to 23,000 ghost recruitments across the province, “with 11,000 in Karachi alone, at a time when there were no vacancies”. He said the government had decided re-testing all the teachers.