Teachers of the Public School Hyderabad on Tuesday threatened to go on a hunger strike for protesting against non-payment of salaries and pensions, and alleged malpractices and negligence of the school management in resolving their issues.
Reportedly, several teachers including Prof Dr Abdul Rehman Siyal and Saima Akhund addressed a press conference in the Hyderabad press club.
They said that the school owed assets and generated income of millions of rupees, and yet teachers were being deprived of salaries, pensions and their basic rights.
“Due to incompetent board of governors, the high-caliber school with more than 1,500 students and 125 teachers has been brought close to the brink of annihilation,” they stated, adding that families of teachers were suffering from severe financial crisis.
“The government has been paying Rs 10 million monthly, whereas actual financial requirement is more than Rs 100 million,” they said, adding that teachers were still working on pay scale of 2013.
They further criticised the school’s management for being negligent and having unprofessional behaviour for executing financial affairs, and said that authorities never bothered to inform teachers an exact amount of income and expenditure of the school.
They asserted that the school has been persistent in achieving 100 percent results in the board examinations for the last four years.
“However, when teachers demand security of their basic rights, they are threatened of dire consequences,” they said, adding that if their demands were not considered by the concerned authorities within a week, they would observe a hunger strike for an indefinite period of time.
Published in Daily Times, October 3rd 2018.