Zubair Qrueshi
The recent move by the government to regularize 137 daily-wage teachers of Islamabad has inspired around 300 elderly lady teachers and they believe that they too would be regularized by the government as their “Protection of Family Life & Wedlock Bill 2023” has already sailed through both the Houses of the Parliament and after signature by the President it will become an Act of the Parliament. Now they are waiting for President Alvi to sign the bill so that they could also be regularized in Islamabad’s schools where they have been teaching for the last several years. Previously, a number of wedlock teachers were regularized by the government on ‘pick and choose’ basis but now all these teachers would benefit once the bill is signed.
Unlike the daily-wage teachers, these wedlock teachers are working against the vacant seats and one-time blanket absorption, as the bill proposes would also resolve the long-standing issue of vacant posts in Islamabad’s 450 schools under the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE). According to the FDE, more than 1,000 posts of teachers are vacant in these schools.
A senior official of the Aiwan-e-Sadr when contacted made it clear that the President House had not received any such bill. “President Arif Alvi never delays Parliament-signed bills and always clears his table of all such pending legislations,” the official said adding once the bill lands in the President House, it would be a matter of one day and the bill would either be signed or returned with objection, if any, as per the standard procedure.
At present the powerful bureaucrats in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) are holding it and seem little-interested to respect the Parliament’s collective wisdom, said another senior official requesting not to be named.
Stopping a bill passed by the Parliament almost three months ago, and not sending it to the President for signature is tantamount to undermining the supremacy of the Parliament which was upheld even the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) in a recent case, said a senior lawyer Sardar Masroof Khan. No matter what the fate of a bill, once it is passed by the Parliament, the PMO is bound to send it to the President for signature, he said.
An affected lady teacher who has received many show cause orders from her parent department and was repatriated by the FDE but received a stay order, said she and her other colleagues were suffering endlessly because of this delay on part of the PMO. There is a typical mind-set in our society that teachers are not given respect by the bureaucracy. These officials calling shots in the PMO should remember that they too were once students of teachers, she said.
