Govt urged to honour pledges

MANSEHRA: The village and neighbourhood council secretaries in Mansehra and Torghar districts on Saturday threatened to go on strike from August 23 if the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government didn’t accept their demands.

“The provincial government has accepted our charter of demands earlier this year and announced to upgrade our basic pay scale within a month but it deviated from its commitments,” Tofique Ayub, the district president of the village and neighbourhood council secretaries, told reporters here.

Flanked by other office-bearers, he said the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Director General Local Governments and Rural Development in June this year had announced that the up-gradation of village and neighbourhood (V/N) secretaries would be completed within a month.

Ayub said that the post of a junior V/N secretary should be upgraded to 11 from 9, senior V/N secretary to 14 from 11 and the post of supervisor should be upgraded to the basic pay scale of 15 as announced by the director general.

“The government employees of other departments are being given remuneration for the polio duties but no such incentives are being given to the secretaries,” he said.

Mr Ayub said that they would observe a complete strike across the district from next week as the government had failed to honour its commitment.

In Torghar, the president of the V/N council secretaries association, Musbahullah Yusufzai, told reporters that they were going on a complete strike from August 23.