KMC teachers block University Road to demand salaries

Karachi

Hundreds of teachers employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) staged a protest at the Civic Centre on Tuesday evening to demand their salaries for the past five months and blocked a large portion of University Road resulting in a massive traffic jam in the area.

A teacher from Landhi, Abdul Mateen, also attempted self-immolation but was stopped just in time by his colleagues. 

The teachers gathered outside the office of KMC Administrator located on the first floor of the Civic Centre building but when they did not get a response from the municipal authorities, they decided to take the sit-in out on the main road and cause a traffic jam.  The teachers claimed it was do-or-die situation for them because they were unable to provide for their families for the past five months. 

This was the third protest to be held by teachers of the KMC to demand their salaries. Earlier, the KMC authorities kept assuring them that payments would be released soon and salaries will be issued next month. 

However, the protesters told The News that the KMC Administrator had not yet signed a bill for releasing their payment.

“It’s been almost five months and teachers of about 365 KMC schools have not received their salaries,” they said. “We have submitted numbers of applications individually, as well as collectively but the KMC Administrator has not bothered to read any of them.”

The protesters chanted slogans against the KMC Administrator and demanded that he immediately release funds for the payment of their salaries. They also chanted slogans against KMC’s finance officials and the senior management.

There are around 1,200 employees in the KMC’s education department and 65 percent of the employees are teachers. 

One of the teachers told The News that salaries have been withheld from August, after the Federal Investigating Agency (FIA) raided the offices of KMC and seized files.

Another teacher who is employed at the Sir Agha Khan English Medium School in Hussainabad said when salary was not released the month after the raid occurred, they had gone to the Civic Centre to inquire about it. “The KMC officials had told us that they were helpless since records were not available,” he said. “This was why, they said, they couldn’t release the payments to teachers.”

After that a number of teachers visited the KMC offices and were told by senior officials that they hadn’t asked for withholding the salaries of any staffer.

“Then a delegation of teachers met KMC officials and discussed this development after which a committee was formed for internal verification of the employees,” he said. 

Another teacher of the Khatoon-e-Pakistan English Medium School claimed that the committee had declared all employees genuine and had asked the finance department to release their salaries.

However, she said, after that another committee was set up and that too declared the status of teachers to be clear and called for the release of salaries after the KMC’s director education signed the relevant bills.

However, said the teacher from Khatoon-e-Pakistan school, the paperwork for the appointment of a new education director has been completed but the KMC Administrator was not the giving go-ahead, again resulting in delay in issuance of salaries.

Ironically, it had been the KMC administrator who had issued the directives to launch an inquiry for tracing the status of these ‘ghost employees’ in KMC’s schools. Now the investigation has been completed, said the protesters, and demanded that salaries be released.

On the other hand, the KMC Administrator had also directed the committee to take measures to release the salaries of employees who had been found ‘genuine’ during inquiry while issuing instructions to take strict actions against the ‘ghost employees’. 

The first protest was launched two days before Eid-ul-Azha and the teachers had been told that they will hear good news soon. They held another protest in November when the KMC’s municipal commissioner had assured the protesters that their issues would be resolved. 

“But we still don’t have our salaries,” they lamented.

Later in the evening, KMC’s director education Abdul Khaliq visited the protestors and showed them a notification according to which the municipal authority will decide the teachers’ fate by examining their attendance rolls, on the basis of their attendance in schools.