KARACHI, June 30 Staff in the Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB) is perturbed over reports that the Islamabad-based educational officialdom is out to implement a 12-year-old decision of the federal government seeking an end to the individual existence of the board.

The UDB, which is rightly regarded as an institution of literary, social and cultural heritage, was deprived of its autonomous status in 2007, and is now being asked to get ready for an unceremonious merger with the National Book Foundation (NBF), said a source in the UDB.

It is learnt that in order to implement a cabinet decision made on January 27, 1997 regarding the merger of the UDB and the Urdu Science Board (USB), Lahore, a team of educational advisers and managers of the federal government, including the education secretary, the NBF managing director and director-general of the USB, met on June 2, 2009. No one was present on behalf of the UDB at the meeting.

The idea that the USB and the UDB could be associated with — or merged into — the NBF on the assumption that the functions of all these three organisations were either similar or overlapping was highlighted during the meeting and as a follow-up measure a three-member committee constituted by the federal education secretary was to visit the UDB from July 2 to 4, said another source.

The latest move is similar to a couple of others taken in the past, including the federal government's intention indicated in early 2005 to shift the office of the UDB from Karachi to Islamabad or change its status.

Some ministers and literary figures belonging to Karachi expressed their reservations to the proposal at that time, saying that the idea behind the status change and shifting was to deprive Karachi of its grand stock of precious and rare books or the institutions.

This latest decision to implement a long-forgotten decision of merger is also being viewed with suspicion by the literati of the city.

The employees of the UDB are not happy after the merger news. “We are performing very well and are all set to complete the last volume of the Urdu dictionary, but this latest move by the bureaucracy is certain to cause damage to our spirit and work,” said an employee of the UDB, adding that the employees opposed the idea of merger with any other institution as it, among other issues, could also deprive them of their due rights.

A UDB source said that the newly appointed chief editor (CE) of the board, Fahmida Riaz, had also opposed the idea and formally asked the education secretary to defer the exercise and not to send his three-member committee to Karachi for the time being.

In her letter to the secretary, the CE said that the decisions to bring to an end to two important institutions associated with Urdu, avowedly still the national language of Pakistan, was unwise.

“This cabinet decision was taken in 1997 but its adverse fall-out will bring a bad name to the present government that does not even know what is going on,” the CE said, adding that at least she could not be party to it - harming the cause of Urdu.

A supporter of the UDB apprehended that the bureaucracy was eying the prime land of the board or its printing machine for some other purposes and that was why it had planned to dismantle the existing fabric of the UDB that had been developed and safeguarded by great scholars of Urdu linguistics and literature.

However, Islamabad has communicated to the UDB CE that the purpose of senior officials' visit to the UDB on July 2 to 4 was to examine the mandate of the board and the job done by it during the past, particularly during the last five years.

The committee would like to discuss the matter not only with the CE but also with senior staff members and as such relevant record might be kept ready and senior members might remain available during the meeting, it is learnt.

Ms Riaz told Dawn that she had talked to the officials of the education ministry over the telephone on Tuesday morning as well and told them that the visit should be postponed as the employees were not willing for the merger or any loss to their existing status.

The preparation of the dictionary is a long ongoing process entailing a lot of teamwork and painstaking research, but Islamabad's resurrection of the merger issue had really upset her as well, particularly at a time when she was working on restructuring the organisational set-up, she said, warning that if she was not allowed to work at the UDB peacefully, she would quit.