PESHAWAR: The staff at Independent Monitoring Unit of education department, which inspired health department to establish such permanent unit, has demanded of the provincial government to follow the model and regularise their services too.

Sources in the Independent Monitoring Unit (IMU) of education department said that the project proved useful in provision of timely and accurate data to the directorate and secretariat of education for corrective measures.

However, what the unit lacks is job security for the staff and itself is merely a project.

“All the employees have been recruited on merit basis through NTS and comprise young master degree holders and professionals,” said sources, regretting that they were working on contract basis.

Asks govt to regularise service

Sources said that success of the monitoring unit inspired the health department to replicate it and name it IMU Health. They added that even the PC-I of IMU Health was developed in the office of IMU Education.

Ironically, the IMU Health has become a permanent entity through an Act of provincial assembly that ensures that all its employees would become permanent staff while IMU Education staff is still working on contract basis as project staff despite proving its effectiveness.

Sources said that after Army Public School attack, IMU Education was tasked to assess and collect data about all the public schools in the province for security measures.

Within a record time of just three days, the data was presented to the department that resulted in timely release of funds for improving security of the schools, they added. “Instead of regularising the service of IMU Education staff, the education management is planning to adopt SNE Model for the unit where the budget will be allocated to it each year and the employees will work on contract basis,” said sources.

A staffer of IMU Education told this scribe on condition of anonymity that a contractual employee would remain at the same position even after working in the unit for decades.

He said that IMU Health became a permanent entity because all of its employees were recruited from market except the project director while in IMU Education all the top management, more than employees, were deputed from civil services.

Frequent transfer and posting affected their performance and issues remained pending.

“This employment model where there is no job security and has no service structure has created low job satisfaction and resulted in more than 300 resignations out of 700 total strength.

“The efficiency of IMU Education has suffered greatly,” said another staffer. Sources said that PTI government took the initiatives to introduce reforms in education sector, so the fear of change in political or bureaucratic environment was another factor that caused job insecurity among the project staffers.

They added that IMU staffers, who were selected purely on merit by the government through NTS, might lose their jobs.

The IMU has been assigned special tasks from time to time like School Improvement Plan (SIP) where medium term budget allocation of conditional grant has been made on the basis of data collected by the unit.

The IMU has tasked to carry on this activity each year.

Another special task was Teacher Incentive Programme under which evaluation of awards for teachers was made on the basis of data collected by IMU.

This task has also been assigned to IMU permanently.

Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2017