The Finance Department of Government of Sindh allowed the Time Scale to its teaching staffers of the Education & Literacy Department from 07 April, 2010, through its notification No FD(SR-I)I(52)/2010 issued on 07 June, 2010. Primary school teachers, elementary teachers, junior school teachers, high school teachers and subject specialists will get the incentive to reach next higher grade if he/she passes some certain number of years mentioned against each nomenclature. It was good news for the teacher fraternity and their long struggle to get the government to pay heed to their demands came to an end when it was notified.
Aside from the incentive given to the teacher fraternity alone, there are many departments working within the framework of the government of Sindh such as finance department, parks and horticulture department, infrastructure department, engineering department, human resources department, and traffic and communication department. Thousands of employees, particularly clerks, have been waiting for their promotion for a decade or so as they do not have proper channel of promotion or enter a cul-de-sac cadre which is also called dead cadre. Muhammed Zubair, a friend of mine, who is the Chief Store Keeper, scale-14, working in the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, has been rendering his duty for almost two decades in the same grade. I can also cite an example of an employee of KMC, Muhammed Yonus Patel, who has been working in scale-06 for more than three decades in which he was appointed.
Without further ado, I want to mention here that the officers responsible to either decide or recommend a matter of promotion or up-gradation do not take much interest to expedite a case of promotion. When a promotion seeker appears before such an officer, he is shown the door on various unfounded pretexts.
Since the Time Scale announced, thousands of the ignored government employees, particularly clerks, victims of red-tape, are seeing it as light at the end of the tunnel as the Time Scale gives a system of promotion for those who have not been promoted for a long period of time. I, therefore, request the authorities concerned to redress the problems of such thousands of employees, especially clerks, who have not been promoted for decades.
JAWED AHMED KHURSHEED
Karachi
