SHC orders SSGC to regularise more than 170 contract employees

The Sindh High Court directed Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) on Thursday to consider the cases of more than 170 contract employees for regularisation within two months without discrimination and in accordance with the law and a Supreme Court judgment.

The employees have approached the court for the regularisation of service, submitting that they were appointed to different lower grades vacant posts on wages from 1992 to 2012 and they were eligible to be regularised under the office memorandum of August 29, 2008, issued by the establishment division.

They have complained that the SSGC were not regularising them on the premise that they were not their employees but the employees of a third- party contractor. The petitioners’ counsel, Syed Shoa-un-Nabi, submitted that his clients had been continuously working on permanent posts in the company and not through a third-party contractor. He contended that superior courts had already passed judgments in identical cases in which contract employees were regularised.

SSGC counsel Asim Iqbal argued that the petition was not maintainable as the petitioners were the employees of a private contractor and drawing salaries and other benefits from their employer.

A division bench comprising Justice Irfan Saadat Khan and Justice Adnanul Karim Memon observed that the SSGC cannot act whimsically while making fresh appointments against the posts already held by the petitioners who had been appointed in a transparent manner.

It directed the gas utility to consider the request of the petitioners for the regularisation of their service within two months without discrimination and in accordance with the law and dicta laid down by the Supreme Court.

School fee cases

A full bench of the Sindh High Court referred petitions against increases in tuition fees of private schools in violation of the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulation and Control) Ordinance 2001 for the constitution of a full bench after one of the judges recused himself from hearing the complaints.

Bushra Jabeen, Arshad Fawad, Mohammad Shariq Feroz and 600 other parents have challenged the tuition fee increase in four private schools in violation of the ordinance. In their petition, they said their children were studying at the private schools situated in KDA Scheme, Gulistan-e-Jauhar and Qasimabad and the schools’ administrations had increased the tuition fees by 12 to 60 per cent in violation of the ordinance.

The counsel for the schools submitted that the SHC had already decided the instant case in other petitions and his clients with satisfied with the judgment in which the court had struck down the rule capping the fee rise at five per cent and ordered the provincial government to frame relevant rules within 90 days.

On March 5, another bench of the high court had quashed a government’s rule that restricts the private educational institutions to increasing their fees by only up to five per cent, and had directed the government to frame relevant rules within 90 days if it wished to regulate private school fee hikes.