About 300 elderly female teachers feel that they will also be regularized by the government after its recent decision to regularize 137 daily-wage teachers in Islamabad.
This is because the government’s “Protection of Family Life & Wedlock Bill 2023” has already passed both Houses of Parliament and will become an Act of Parliament upon the President’s signature.
They are currently awaiting President Alvi’s signature on the law so they may be officially recognized as regular teachers at the Islamabad schools where they have been employed for a number of years.
The government used to “pick and choose” wedlock instructors to regularize, but if the bill is enacted, all of these teachers will gain benefits.
Wedlock teachers, in contrast to daily-wage teachers, are fighting against vacant seats and one-time blanket absorption since the measure they are advocating would also address the long-standing problem of unfilled positions in the 450 schools run by the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) in Islamabad. In these institutions, there are over 1,000 open teaching positions, according to the FDE.
When contacted, a senior Aiwan-e-Sadr official clarified that no such bill had been received by the President’s office.
- The official stated, “President Arif Alvi never delays Parliament-signed bills and always clears his table of all such pending legislation.”
- He went on to say that after the bill lands in the President’s House, it will either be signed or, in the event that there are any objections, returned in accordance with standard procedure.
According to another senior official who asked to remain anonymous, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is currently controlled by powerful bureaucrats who don’t seem to be interested in deferring to the collective wisdom of the Parliament.
Senior advocate Sardar Masroof Khan stated that stopping a measure that the Parliament passed about three months ago and refusing to send it to the President for signature amounted to compromising the Parliament’s sovereignty, which the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) has upheld in a recent case.
He stated that the PMO is required to forward bills to the President for signature after they are passed by the Parliament, regardless of the outcome.
The impacted teacher, who was repatriated by the FDE yet was given a stay order after receiving multiple show-cause orders from her parent department, claimed that she and her coworkers were suffering unceasingly as a result of the PMO’s delay.
In our society, there is a prevalent belief that the bureaucracy does not value teachers. She remarked that these PMO decision-makers had to keep in mind that they were once teachers’ students as well.
