ISLAMABAD: In the first week of July, Aoun Mohammad, a network administrator at the Ministry of Information and Technology (IT), and 18 of his colleagues won a year-long battle with the ministry regarding their employment. However, a week later, Aoun and his colleagues were sacked.

On July 7, Islamabad High Court (IHC) Justice Noorul Haq N Qureshi directed the federal government to expedite the release of their salaries. Aoun and the other petitioners were expecting to receive 15 monthly salaries, which had been stopped since last year, before this Eid.

However, the sudden termination crushed their hopes of celebrating Eid, and they are now planning to file a contempt of court petition in the IHC.

As per the court record, Aoun and the 18 other petitioners were employed on contract basis by the IT ministry as network administrators for the Federal Government Data Centre (FGDC) project in 2004.

The project aimed at providing basic IT infrastructure to all federal divisions, ministries and inter-connecting them through a secure data centre.

At the time, their basic pay scale (BPS) was not determined and a lump sum package was awarded to each employee. In March 2005, the federal government issued a notification stating that the petitioners may be considered equivalent to grade 18 employees.

In 2007, the IT ministry revised the PC-1 of the FGDC project, but the salaries of the petitioners were not enhanced. The following year, they were given a salary package between Rs50,000 and Rs75,000 per month. In 2013, the petitioners approached IHC for the regularisation of their services and the court accepted their petition.

According to court documents, the petitioners allege that the government deliberately flouted the court order for the regularisation of their services. Moreover, to punish them for their actions, they were all demoted to grade 16.

During the hearing, the IT ministry claimed on July 1 that the petitioners were never been appointed as network administrators. As per their employment contract, the competent authority had the power to assign them different tasks.

The written reply of the ministry, submitted in IHC, states, “The incumbents cannot be entitled for the pay of the post of Network/System Administrators, unless appointed on the subject post.

“The petitioners were appointed as Assistant Network/System Administrators on a fixed salary. As per their employment contract, they are only entitled to a travel allowance, which is admissible to grade-16 officers.”

However, during the detailed arguments, Zahid Sohail, a law officer of the IT ministry had conceded before the court, “The pay package, which has been disputed in this petition, is already in process”.

Subsequently, the court directed the federal government to finish the process of finalising the pay package of the petitioners within a month.

On July 15, the IT ministry asked the petitioners to leave their jobs, as their services were no longer required, one of the petitioners told Dawn.

He said that the IT ministry was spending a large sum of money on “so-called IT specialists”, who have been recruited by the incumbent government. However, the authorities are not willing to retain these professionals, who have spent over a decade in the ministry, and successfully completed different IT related tasks.

When contacted, IT ministry spokesman Sagheer Wattoo said that authorities were revamping the entire infrastructure of the “otherwise inactive ministry”. He said that the ministry has established a National IT Board and is working on restructuring of all allied departments. He, however, said that during this process, only unnecessary staff has been released.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2014