ISLAMABAD: Despite the passage of several years, the Capital Administration and Development Division (CA&DD) and Establishment Division (ED) could not finalise the legislation draft for re-designated and upgraded teachers of the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), Daily Times has learnt reliably.
According to available information, around 1,200 faculty members having the cadre of Trained Graduate Teacher (TGT) with the pay scale (BPS-16) were re-designated as Secondary School Teachers (SSTs) and upgraded to BPS-17 in 2011. But the rules regarding these newly defined posts could not be made part of the official gazette so far.
Last year the Ministry of CA&DD and the FDE were hardly able to prepare an initial draft regarding the addition and amendments in the rules regarding the said cadre of teachers. The matter is still in limbo.
A senior official of the ministry, who wished not to be named, disclosed that after preparing the initial work, the draft was sent to the Establishment Division for finalisation. After the approval of the ED, the draft would have to be made part of the official gazette.
He added that the forwarded draft by the CA&DD was rejected by the ED once with some technical objections and it asked the ministry to mend them and forward the same again.
“The CA&DD is working on the draft and it will be submitted again to the ED very soon”, claimed the official.
Another official said this exercise should be done before altering the teachers BPS and posts’ names. The development came into being in 2010 when the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was in power.
While criticising the previous as well as the current ruling PML-N, a teacher said that the rulers did not bother about the issues of lower employees and they particularly ignored teachers, he said.
“One can notice the priorities of rulers when one sees that they could not even define the rules despite the passage of over six years. Hundreds of teachers are getting retired in the same grade due to this issue”, the teacher regretted.
Daily Times spoke to many teachers and they expressed frustration over this kind of failure by the authorities concerned. They said that due to this failure a large number of teacher were being deprived from their basic rights, adding that their promotion to the next grade.
The teachers also said that SSTs were being retired in the same service scale wherein a large number of SSTs was lying vacant in the FDE’s institutions that ultimately caused the suffering of students.
The information available suggests that there is a total of 1239 total posts of SSTs in the FDE while out of these 267 slots are lying vacant since years.
It is worth mentioning here that beside the SSTs around 1772 positions of various cadres are also vacant in the FDE and its institutions. The Parliamentary Secretary for CA&DD, Maiza Hameed, in a recent meeting with journalists assured of filling the vacant posts of the FDE very soon.
The President of the School Teachers Association, Malik Ameer, said that the issue of the rules amendments should be resolved immediately as it might create frustration among the teachers and might directly affect their teaching performance.
The Director School, FDE, Abdul Waheed Khan, told this scribe that the directorate had no hurdle in this regard, adding that it had forwarded the draft to the CA&DD. “The ministry sent back the draft to the FDE once or twice for correction or addition of some points in the draft while the directorate clarified all loopholes immediately and submitted it to the ministry in October last year”, Khan claimed.
However, no official was available for comments in the CA&DD including the Minister Tariq Fazal Chaudhry.