February 21, 2006	Tuesday	Muharram 22, 1427

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GILGIT, Feb 20: More than 300 schoolteachers of community schools staged a seven-hour sit-in in the central education directorate here on Monday to protest against what they termed the indifferent attitude of authorities towards their problems.

A spokesman for the protesters, Abdul Ghayas, said that the number of affected teachers was more than 1,150 in the rural areas and they had been working in the department on temporary basis since 1994.

He gave the ultimatum that they would be forced to close down over 540 of the community schools in the six districts of the Northern Areas if their service was not made permanent.

He said: “The education department has been paying Rs1,200 a month to run these schools, that accounted for maintenance and salaries. Each school has three teachers and one can imagine our plight when this amount is distributed among the teachers after deducting the maintenance charges.”

The protesting teachers, including a considerable number of women teachers, further said that they had not received their salaries (Rs300) for the past one year.

They said that they had been assured that once the World Bank stopped funding for the project, they would be absorbed in the education department on regular posts but it never happened.

Also, they said that there were 1,510 vacant posts of teachers in the education department but they were not being adjusted against these posts. They said that they had spent 12 years in the hope of getting their service regularized, which had also rendered them overage for fresh jobs.