KARACHI, Oct 12: The Federal Minister for Education, Lt-Gen (Retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi, on Tuesday said he was working on restructuring the basic pay scale of primary teachers to BPS-14, so that competent people with an urge for a better career join the teaching profession.

"I want to induct primary teachers having no less than intermediate qualification, give them grade 14 and Rs5,000 as initial salary, but the proposal is being deferred on the grounds that other government employees will also demand the same," he said, speaking at a two-day conference titled "The new face of HR", a conference aligning human resources with business strategy to derive results.

He regretted that people mostly with poor academic careers and a low level of talent easily found a place in the public education sector due to political influence or favouritism by the bureaucracy.

Listing major threats to public sector organisations, he said the number one problem was lack of leadership which barred timely decisions, adding that no country could prosper without the right use of human resources.

Mr Qazi said the mind-set would only change when priorities of a government were set in the right direction. "Good governance produces its own leaders," he said. He underlined the importance of technical education and noted that the country was producing a lot of unproductive graduates whose education was irrelevant to the market demand.

"Instead of producing people holding BA and MA degrees, we should focus on technical education linked to the demands of industries." "The lift-operator at my ministry in Islamabad is a second class MA in Economics.

While 50 per cent people recruited as cops in the Motorway Police are graduates, though the required qualification for the job was matriculation," he said, citing examples of excessive availability of non-technical graduates in the country.

He called upon industrials to set up technical institutes to promote human resources in the right direction. He said that modernisation and computerisation in public sector organisations would help in a great way to make them compatible and growth-oriented.

The federal minister also underlined the need for strict monitoring and vigilance in public sector entities including CBRs, where he mentioned that professional spirit and a change of culture was needed especially at the lower level. Commenting on the role of labour unions in contributing towards production and economic growth, the minister said he was not in favour of labour unions. - APP