KHAR: All Bajaur Contractors Association on Friday expressed their anger over the absence of senior officials at the local communication and works department for the last few months and threatened to stop work on the ongoing schemes if the vacant posts were not filled within a week.

Addressing a press conference, the association’s president Rahat Yousaf, Gul Kareem, Umar Wahid and Abdul Ghaffar said that the post of executive engineer had been lying vacant for the past three months, while two posts of sub-divisional officers were unfilled since January 2016.

They said that absence of senior officers had not only caused delay in approval of their bills for development schemes, but also halted development projects in the agency.

They said that executive engineer was the only authorised official to pass their bills.

The contractors claimed that no tendering had taken place for any new development scheme since September 2017.

They said that they had brought the issue into the notice of additional chief secretary and chief engineer, Fata, but to no avail.

They appealed to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor and chief engineer, Fata, to fill the vacant posts immediately.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2017