SAHIWAL: The Punjab Professors and Lecturers Association (PPLA) will begin a sit-in outside the Punjab Assembly from Tuesday.

PPLA leaders say they have been following a “consultative and collaborative approach” with the Higher Education Department (HED) for the last two years but in vain.

PPLA President Abdul Khaliq Nadeem said they demanded pay protection and service regularization of regular/contract lectures of badges 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2012 besides improvement in service promotion structure (a five-tier promotion as announced in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and de-linking teachers’ promotion to higher grades until the HED allocated reasonable financial resources for their training.

Provincial HED Minister Yasir Humayun told Dawn on phone he supported PPLA’s first two demands and these would be realised when the Punjab government got the required budget. About the third demand, he said he would negotiate with the PPLA and reach the conclusion. The PPLA says the HED has not been able to allocate financial resources, design syllabus and develop a training academy in the last nine years. The inefficiency of the HED should not affect teachers’ promotion policy.

Mr Khaliq said until the proper infrastructure was not developed as per the 2010 Promotion Policy, the HED could not hold regular promotions. He said such policies deprived 200 college teachers of their promotion and they retired without being promoted to next grades in 2018. “This will happen in 2019 again,” he said, adding that under such circumstances, the PPLA proposed amendments to the Promotion Policy of 2010.

Mr Khaliq said that since January 2018 not a single promotion was done by the department because of deadlock on the training of teachers. PPL A activists say They are ready for professional training but this does not mean the HED exploit college teacher promotion in the name of ‘administrative training’. He said Mr Sarfaraz was ready to award the five-tier promotion formula to public sector college teachers but the provincial bureaucracy was frustrating their plans.

He said the Superior Courts had issued orders of regularisation and pay protection of regular/contract lecturers but the HED was not following courts’ decision and continuously deducing money from regular/contract teachers’ monthly salaries.

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2019