Due to lack of government interest and shortage of funds, the Civil Defence Department (CDD) of the region was in a pathetic condition as it was short of staff and lacked equipment which made it unable to cope with emergency situations.
Many posts in several tehsils, including civil defence officer in CDD Rawalpindi, had been lying vacant for several years. Moreover, except one tehsil, all the other tehsils of the region did not even have their own offices.
Moreover, the seats of district officer (BPS-17), including bomb disposal commander and instructor, were lying vacant in Rawalpindi for quite some time, and the situation was same in the other tehsils of the region.
In CDD, the staff from grade 1 to 10 was appointed by the district officer, grade 11 to 15 was inducted by the director general and grade 15 to 17 and above officers were appointed by the home secretary.
“The department faced immense problems during emergency situations as it had no communication system,” a source said.
The civil defence has the duty to protect civilian population areas, airports, railway stations and other public places during emergency situations but the current situation of the department is such that it requires help for itself.
rs t�!ru蟃 �o} degrees, both at domestic and international levels, but it had also devised the IPFP programme to facilitate the placement of these scholars at academic and research institutions. This comes as a result of the visionary approach of HEC to ensure proper utilisation of the manpower being trained in fields relevant to the socio-economic development of Pakistan through investments in the scholarship programmes.
The HEC Interim Placement of Fresh PhDs Program was underlying two-pronged approach; primarily it provides lucrative avenues of employment to the fresh PhD professionals and secondly it meets the faculty requirements of public and private sector universities/DAIs to ensure quality teaching and research, which was one of the core strategic aims of HEC. IPFP provides all Pakistani fresh PhD graduates an opportunity to be placed as assistant professors on a tenure track-system-based assistant professorship for a maximum of one year. The qualified applicants were placed only in those universities which were ready to offer these professionals a fair chance of absorption on permanent posts through normal selection process within the one year contract period. Further each IPFP PhD was also provided a Rs 0.5 million start-up research grant to initiate a feasible research project at his or her host university, immediately after joining. This on-going regular program was open to all fields. The placed scholars had found this programme quite useful and effective and termed the programme quite helpful in countering brain drain at the national level.
