PCRWR employees protest their non-regularisation today

ISLAMABAD: Over 150 employees of the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) will stage a protest outside the National Press Club on Monday (today) and march towards Parliament against the government’s ‘alleged refusal’ to regularise their services, despite having served the department for many years.

They have circulated a letter to the members of the Senate and the National Assembly, drawing their attention to their continuous agony. They said in the letter that the Establishment Division had approved their postings and the Finance Division also approved funds in this connection, but they were being denied permanent job. The PCRWR and over a dozen other agencies work under the Ministry of Science and Technology, which has history of absorbing employees, inducted for development projects in the past.

They lamented that since 2016, they had not been paid their salaries, and this had resulted into economic miseries for them and their families. They pointed out that PCRWR is the only government-owned water quality testing institution, which was being paralysed, and all its 24 labs across Pakistan and the major one in the head office i.e. the National Water Quality Laboratory was also almost non-functional due to non-availability of experts.

PCRWR employees, who were inducted for a Safe Drinking Water Project, said that during his stint, council Chairman Dr Muhammad Ashraf had moved a summary for their permanent job, but it was never approved by the federal government for unknown reasons.

They noted, on one side, they were made jobless, while on the other, the labs, equipped with latest tools and gadgets, were rotting in a country, where some 50 million people are believed to be affected by arsenic poisoning, while 85 pr cent water, being consumed, was unfit for human consumption. And this not only made it crucial for the council to function with full potential but also expand its water testing network to reach out to maximum number of people across Pakistan.