ISLAMABAD, June 22: Police Wednesday busted the protest of the employees of the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) against the closure of their department when the employees tried to march on the nearby parliament building.

Police used batons and tear gas to stop the several hundred protesters who had been camping in the vast square in front of the presidency and the parliament for some days.

Their seething anger boiled over after the Senate decided that the NCHD would be disbanded on June 30 under the 18th Amendment and the 16,000 teachers and other professionals it employed must be paid all their dues by then.

Inside the National Assembly, meanwhile, Minister In-charge of Cabinet Secretariat Khurshid Ahmed Shah announced responding to a call attention notice that the government would take the issue of NCHD employees to the Council of Common Interest as three provinces, other than Sindh, had refused to absorb the employees after the NCHD is devolved to the provinces.

He said the ruling PPP’s policy was to provide jobs to people, not to deprive them of their employment.

About 10 protesters, five of them women, were injured and 40 were arrested in the fracas that ensued when the disgruntled NCHD workers jumped over the barbed wire fence that blocks the way to the parliament. A policewoman and a head constable were also injured in the scuffle.

Police officers justified their use of force on the ground that the protesters were violating Section 144 restrictions in the city.

The NCHD is being abolished because the 18th Amendment has transferred education, among other subjects, to the provinces.

The prospect of the NCHD being disbanded because of the unwillingness of some provinces to fund it after its devolution had created unrest among the thousands of teachers of NCHD feeder schools and adult literacy centres across the country.

Hundreds of them set up a camp in Islamabad to highlight their fears of losing their jobs.

Their presence for days, holding banners and placards, attracted public attention to their plight. PPP MNA Justice (retired) Fakhrun Nisa Khokhar even joined their protest for a brief period.

The NCHD has been working since 2002, providing support to government line departments at grassroots level to achieve four out of the eight Millennium Development Goals. Those were: universal primary education, promotion of gender equality through women empowerment, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health.

NCHD protesters told the media that theirs was the only organisation that possessed complete data regarding out-of-school children, locations where no government schools are present, tools for reporting on enrolment and dropouts, and much more.

Abdul Fatah Marro, member NCHD Joint Action Committee, described the closing of NCHD as “an extreme step and sheer injustice to the thousands who had been serving the programme for 10 years.”

According to him, 7,000 schools would be closed, denying 500,000 children education. “Is this what we want for our future?” he asked.

Saima Rana, NCHD Coordinator for Punjab, found it strange that the federal and provincial governments wanted to abandon a trained workforce of thousands of professionals, with a training-cost-tag of millions of rupees. “Instead of giving them a regular cadre and make best use of them, our rulers are laying off technical human resources,” she lamented.