ISLAMABAD, Oct 6: For 340 vacancies, advertised by the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) as many as 150,000 applications have been received with FDE. Educationists indicate that this shows financial condition in the country is worsening.

According to sources, FDE had advertised 340 vacancies, including 220 vacancies of teachers and 120 vacancies for other staff recruitments and the last date of filing application was September 21.

As holiday was announced by the government on September 21 and there were holidays on September 22 and 23 because of Saturday and Sunday, so applications were received for another two working days.

Handling the applications has become a problem for the staff of FDE because around one hundred and fifty thousand applications for different posts have been received and FDE does not have the capacity to scrutinise and enter data of all the applications within a fortnight.

An officer of FDE requesting not to be identified said that it has been decided that at least 10 persons will be called from different schools for the data entry.

“It does not seem that data can be entered before one month and after that call letters will be sent to the applicants,” he said.

An economist, Abdul Razzaq, while talking to Dawn said that because of energy crises, private jobs and businesses are affected.

“In the past there was a trend in the youth to join the private sector because salaries in private sector were much more as compared to government sector. According to survey reports during the last three years as many as one million persons have become jobless in the private sector, so people have been looking for government jobs again,” he said.

“Because of less job opportunities not only competition for the jobs is increasing but crime rate in society is also increasing,” he said

An applicant for the post of teacher, Muhammad Waseem said that if he had known that 150,000 persons were applying, he would have never applied.

“Government should create job opportunities for the youth because if they have no jobs, they will get involved in negative activities,” he said.

Director Administration FDE, Shahid Khan while talking to Dawn confirmed that applications received for 340 posts were around 150,000 and said that FDE has been calling data entry operators from different schools to computerise the data.