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KARACHI, Oct 26: The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board has reinstated the last batch of 23 employees dismissed in 1998, a division bench of the Sindh High Court was informed on Friday.
The bench, which consisted of Chief Justice Sabihuddin Ahmed and Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, was hearing a petition moved by the 23 employees. They submitted that hundreds of their colleagues sacked in 1998 like them were reinstated by the Supreme Court in 2002.
Their counsel, Mohammad Nawaz Shaikh, argued that the benefit of the SC order should be extended to other employees placed in similar circumstances.
He said all the employees were recruited in 1996 or 1997 and were dismissed following change of government at the centre in 1997.
The KWSB said the employees had since been reinstated and the petitioners had no cause of action. The bench disposed of the petition in terms of the KWSB reply.
Notices to Pakistan Steel
Another division bench consisting of Justices Mushir Alam and Mohammad Afzal Soomro, meanwhile, issued notices to the Pakistan Steel management in petitions moved by PS manager Omer Ali Khan, deputy manager Rifat Mirza and junior officer Haji Muhammad Tunio. Advocate Abdur Razzak, the petitioners’ counsel, submitted that the officials had been adversely affected by the new promotion policy of the management. The policy allows wide discretion to the management to disregard seniority.
They said they had been superseded by employees junior to them. The petitioners said they had challenged their supercession by departmental appeals and subsequently approached the Federal Service Tribunal for redress of their grievance. However, their appeals in the FST abated following a Supreme Court decision that corporation employees were not civil servants and did not fall within the purview of the tribunal.
