LAHORE: Around 300 staff members of lower cadre, working with the regional cricket associations which have now been abolished, are still waiting for their salary for the month of August to be released by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB).

Dawn has learnt from the officials of now-defunct regional associations that the PCB is not ready to even clear the situation and status of these employees, after abolishing the regional bodies, to switch to provincial associations recently.

As so far no announcement about the officials of provincial associations has been made by the PCB, confusion prevails on the regional bodies’ status and that of their staff members.

“We have been contacting the PCB to get information about the staff members’ salaries but [so far] the Board has remained tight lipped, saying chairman Ehsan Mani has to take a final decision in this regard,” said the regional officials in a joint statement.

According to the system, 17 employees are working each in 16 regional associations and among them 15 are ground staff, who are included in low-paid staff category. Furthermore, they also complained that they did not receive any annual increment with the salary of July 2019, which the PCB has given to its own staff as per annual practice.

It may be mentioned that according to the procedure, the regional bodies have to appoint these 17 staff members and then refer their cases to the PCB, which is to transfer the salaries of the staff directly into their accounts.

“At least the PCB should clear the situation, whether or not it will pay them, so that we can arrange funds to pay their salaries from their own [resources] to get the suffering employees out of this crucial time where the future is looking dark,” they said.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2019