- More than a thousand daily wagers bemoan salary delay while 150 teachers draw salaries without having to work
With the connivance of the staff of Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), as many as 150 people listed as teachers are allegedly drawing salaries without having to teach in any school of the capital city, Pakistan Today has learnt.
Due to the non-recruitment of regular teachers in the federal schools for the last many years, around 1,800 teachers are working on daily wage basis to make up for the shortage of teachers in the schools under the control of FDE. These teachers are being recruited only on presentation of their resumes without any verification of educational certificates and degrees on the “personal whims” of FDE high ups.
While around 1,000 daily wage teachers have not been paid for a year and a half due to the lack of funds at the disposal of FDE, about 150 ghost teachers are regularly getting their salaries without any delay due to the “patronage of influential staff members”, sources in the directorate have revealed.
To further aggravate the matters for the regular daily wage teachers, the directorate’s ‘influential staff’ has excluded the names of 58 regular daily wagers from the salary list to accommodate the ghost teachers, the sources added.
A number of sit-ins by the aggrieved daily wagers were staged in FDE in last two weeks to press for release of their salaries but so far they have not found any respite.
The director schools (females) refused to comment on the issue saying that the matter was related to the director administration. However, she admitted that around 1,500 vacancies of female teachers in Islamabad schools were lying vacant for the last three years due to the ban on new recruitment by the government.
“We are facing a lot of difficulty in meeting the teachers’ requirement in female schools due to the shortage but we cannot do anything at our own to get new teachers recruited as it is a policy matter resting with the government,” the director told.
FDE Director General (DG) Amir Khawaja was not available in his office to comment on the situation regarding the issue of ghost teachers under his control.
However, FDE Deputy Director Coordination and Media Tahir Bhatti told Pakistan Today that Khawaja has recently been appointed as the DG and he has inherited many long drawn issues from his predecessors and he needs some time to settle the unresolved matters.
“The new DG is an upright officer and does not tolerate any corruption in the directorate as he is doing a lot to nab the corrupt elements in the directorate and efforts have been made to resolve the pending issues of the staff. Recently the directorate has settled issue of regularisation of contractual teachers by sending the matter to the Standing Committee of the National Assembly,” Bhatti added.
On the issue of ghost teachers, Bhatti assured that the matter will be brought into the notice of the DG and if any irregularities or corruption was found, the culprits won’t be given any concession, irrespective of the influence of those elements.