CHARSADDA: The secondary schoolteachers held a protest here on Sunday to demand upgradation of their service scale.

The SSTs Welfare Association set Monday as deadline to caretaker provincial government for acceptance of its demand. The protesters demanded of the government to issue notification about upgradation of 22,000 teachers till Monday otherwise they would hold protest outside the building of provincial assembly for indefinite period.

They said that government was not upgrading SSTs despite passage of a resolution by the provincial assembly and approval of provincial cabinet. They said that discrimination against SSTs was intolerable.

Addressing the protesting teachers and later talking to journalists, SSTs Welfare Association provincial president Zulfikar Ahmed, former provincial president Ikram Bacha, former provincial chairman Habibullah Nashiman, district chairman Qasim Khan, district president Sohail Khan Umarzai and Jamshed Khan said that they had been struggling for their rights for the last three decades.

They said that provincial assembly passed a resolution for upgrading SSTs in 2015 but it was not implemented. Similarly, in 2017, court gave a decision in favour of their upgradation but it was also not enforced, they added.

They said that the provincial cabinet on January 17, 2023 approved upgradation of SSTs that was scheduled to be implemented on July 1, 2023 but the caretaker government did not issue a notification in that regard.

Zulfiqar Ahmed said that the caretaker provincial government was delaying issuance of the notification on the pretext of financial crisis. He said that recently the government upgraded the employees of livestock department from BPS-11 to BPS-16.

“The upgradation of teachers will cost the government only Rs1 billion,” he said. He demanded of the government to immediately issue a notification about upgradation of teachers.

Meanwhile, people staged a sit-in near Sardheri police station to demand arrest of the killers of police officer Rahimdad.

Minister Ehsanullah Khan, former union council nazim Sajjad Khattak, Jahangir Khan Kodakhel and other speakers criticised police for not arresting the killers of their colleague.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2023