Over a dozen teachers’ promotion stuck in red tape Jamila Achakzai

Islamabad :Over a dozen teachers of Islamabad’s government colleges are frustrated at seeing their promotion stuck in red tape for two and a half months.

Blaming their misery on the Capital Administration and Development Division, which oversees government schools and colleges in the Islamabad Capital Territory through the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), the teachers have even threatened agitation to ‘claim the right’.

Among them are 13 lecturers (BPS-17) of model colleges and six of federal government colleges, who are long overdue for promotion to the BPS-18 posts of assistant professor. They’re Aneesul Hasnain, Zaheer Abbas, Sabir Ali, Abid Ali, Haider Ali and Syed Asad Abbas of the FG colleges and Ghulam Azam, Naeem Mushtaq, Gulzar Ahmad, Salman Shahid, Imran Khaliq, Zubair Ahmad, Amir Muhammad, Sajid Hassan Minhas, Nasir Shah, Faisal Shahzad, Saleem Brohi, Hafiz Nisar Ahmad and Zahid Ali of the model colleges.

The FDE had formally put up their promotion case to the CADD’s Promotion Cell on November 2, 2017. Almost a month later, December 6 to be exact, the CADD Departmental Promotion Committee met and approved all those cases after thorough discussion.

However, the promotions haven’t been formalised even 11 weeks after their approval due to the CADD’s failure to notify them. Officials in the know blame the long delay in the notification of promotions on the CADD additional secretary, insisting the matter got stuck on the back burner first due to Dr Jamal Yousaf’s purported pressing official engagements and later due to him going on leave for treatment of some kidney problem.

They feel if there’s a will, the matter will be resolved within days. Regretting red tape, the teachers say they’re disappointed and distressed by the ‘denial’ of promotion for the last 15 years.

A teacher told ‘The News’ that the delaying of promotion notification on part of the CADD was tantamount to ‘killing the teachers’ skills’. “We’ve spent precious time and resources in pursuing our promotion cases, which otherwise would have been spent on academic excellence,” he said.

Another teacher resented bureaucratic hurdles to promotion, saying it’s demoralising the teaching staff members of FDE colleges, by and large. He warned that if the CADD didn’t notify promotion without delay, the teachers would be left with no choice but to stage protests to claim the right. The Federal Government College Teachers Association also threw its full weight behind the protest warning and said it would go to any lengths to protect the teachers’ rights.