SAHIWAL: Lending support to the cause of teachers, a good number of students of the Government Commerce College on Wednesday took out a procession demanding regularisation of more than 1,000 professors and lecturers working in 118 colleges of Punjab on a contract.

Hundreds of protesting students and teachers, wearing black armbands and flaunting placards showing anti-government slogans, blamed the Higher Education Department (HED) for not regularly paying salaries to 1,000 contract teachers.

They said these teachers did not receive October’s salary and were in financial straits.

Ijaz Nayar, an office-bearer of the Contract Professors and Lectures Association, told this correspondent that it was beginning of the movement (outside the college premises) and would spread to the entire province.

Contract teachers say they are being victimised

He said when the contract staff was shifted from Tevta to the Higher Education Department in 2010, there was an agreement between the two that all the contract teaching staff of commerce colleges would be regularised under a policy of 2004. “Nothing has been done even four years after the shifting to the HED,” he said.

“Worse, we have been denied the salary of October and it has prompted us to boycott classes and take to the street,” he said.

He said the CPLA demanded regularisation of 1,000 contract staff, regular disbursement of salary, provision of all the allowances being enjoyed by regular employees and annual increments.

Published in Dawn, November 27th , 2014