October 29, 2008	Wednesday	Shawwal 29, 1429

KARACHI, Oct 28: The Sindh directorate of private institutions, which is a regulatory body overseeing the functioning of private schools in the province, is fast losing its effectiveness due to official apathy and its inaccessible location.

Complaints against the directorate and its officials continue to pour in newspaper offices not only from parents but also from private school teachers.

Most of these complaints are about exorbitant tuition fees, so-called ‘annual charges’, computer fee even for kindergarten students, small and overcrowded classrooms and of non-payment of salaries to teachers during summer vacations.

A number of parents have made complaints that on the one hand the location of the directorate on the highly-congested Nishter Road (formerly known as Lawrence Road), adjacent to the defunct KMC workshop, makes its extremely unreachable for them, and on the other hand officials at the directorate never respond to their complaints and queries on phone that mostly stay off the hook or remains connected to any fax machine.

They say that even if they manage to reach the directorate after taking pain of passing through the congested arteries of the area, they are told by the peons sitting outside the office of the director that ‘the Sahab is either busy in a meeting or has gone to the Sindh Secretariat’.

During a visit to the directorate this reporter bumped into a middle-aged woman complainant, who was waiting there to see the director to know what action the directorate had taken against her written complaint that she had lodged against a private school in Gulshan-i-Iqbal about ‘four months’ ago for collecting ‘annual charges’ from students.

Two teachers of a private school waiting for the director outside his office told Dawn that they had come to lodge a complaint against a private school in Federal B Area which had deprived them of their two-month (June and July) salaries although they had been teaching there for the last one-and-a-half year.

“Isn’t it unjust that our school is charging summer vacations fee from students on the pretext that they have to give salaries to its staff, but depriving us of our salaries of the two months,” they said.

Another perturbed parent, who recently visited the directorate, told Dawn that he was told by a peon that the director had gone for inspection of schools when he reached at the director’s office to lodge a complaint against a private school in North Nazimabad for charging exorbitant tuition fee from his two daughters and a son.

“Since I had taken a day off from my office for the purpose, I preferred to wait to see the director but after almost half an hour when I was walking in the lobby where the director’s office is situated I was stunned when I saw the director sitting in an adjacent room gossiping with his subordinates,” he said.

The rush of complainants, who had been waiting at the directorate despite its odd location for their grievances addressed for months, spoke volumes about the effectiveness of the offices.