KARACHI, Dec 31: The All Pakistan School Management Association, Sindh, has urged the provincial government to ensure relief to educational institutions being run by private sector.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, the association's representatives highlighted the issues being faced by private schools and appealed to the governor not to accord assent to the bill pertaining to amendments to the Sindh Private Educational Institutions (Regulation and Control) Ordinance 2001, as those were aimed to establish hegemony of the educational functionary of the government.

The chairman of the association, Syed Khalid Shah, said that amendments made to the Ordinance were uncalled for and irrational, which would badly affect the school education process. He said that the private management schools should have been taken into confidence prior to making any change in laws.

It may be recalled here that the provincial education minister had introduced a bill seeking government's role in the fixation of fee structure of private schools and payment of salaries to teachers.

Under another change, as adopted by the Sindh Assembly on Dec 8, it was mandatory for privates schools to ensure teaching of Sindhi language in accordance with the existing law and rules.

Syed Khalid Shah said that private school management had got all reasons to protest over the amendments, as those were meant to further policing on them. He urged the authorities to withdraw the one-sided amendments.

The government should include this association in the preparation of rules or formula in the light of changes, he added.

He said that the role of educational officers in regulating the fee structure had not been satisfactory in the past and that was why government promulgated the 2001 ordinance, which helped reducing the red-tappism and unnecessary exploitation of the then available tools by the district education officers.

It had also been a practice in the past that the functionaries never cleared any request for increase in fees in time and delayed the matter without any obvious reason, he added.

The chairman, assisted by Abdul Naeem, Muhammad Ahmad Khan and other representatives of the association, maintained that the private schools were already bearing the burden of commercial taxes, irrational utility charges and implementation of unjust policies of building authorities.

The association, which claims to have majority of the private schools with it, demanded of the government to ensure abolition of commercial taxes and charges, stop KBCA from issuing notices to private schools operating in residential plots, provision of electricity to private schools on non-commercial rates as agreed at a higher forum of the government.

"If our demands and reservations were ignored, we would run a campaign for mobilization of opinion in favour of private schools, which are playing their due role in the promotion of education," the office-bearers concluded.