July 21, 2008	Monday	Rajab 17, 1429

LARKANA, July 20: Sindhi writers and intellectuals on Sunday lent support to ad hoc lecturers’ hunger strike outside the press club, which entered 15th day on Sunday. The lecturers are demanding regularisation of their service.

A group of writers led by Akhlaque Ansari visited the strikers’ camp and assured them of their cooperation. No representative of the government has so far visited their camp, the lecturers complained.

Had Ms Benazir Bhutto been alive she would have ordered their regularisation within no time as her governments in 1989 and 1994 had regularised thousands of ad hoc lecturers in Sindh, they said.

But this government was reluctant to take a decision and now even their salaries had been withheld for six months, they said.

The writers urged Asif Zardari and chief minister to take up the issue in the cabinet’s July 22 meeting and make no more delay in regularising the ad hoc lecturers.

In Sukkur, office-bearers of the Sukkur chapter of the Sindh Professors and Lecturers Association continued hunger strike outside the press club on the second consecutive day on Sunday.

Ad hoc lecturers from Sukkur, Ghotki, Pano Akil and Khairpur who observed hunger strike at the camp told journalists that they had been ad hoc for three years.

They complained that the government had turned the back on its promise to regularise them and called for regularising the services of 330 ad hoc lecturers of the province.