Education secretary, Pindi DCO served notices: Teachers' promotion case
Rawalpidni: The Lahore High Court's Rawalpindi bench on Wednesday issued notices to secretary education Punjab and the district coordination officer of Rawalpindi to submit their comments in a petition filed by four elementary schoolteachers seeking promotions.
Justice Hamid Ali Shah was hearing the petition of Ghulam Rabbani, Abdul Aziz Jaffri, Mohammad Mukhtar Hussain and Syed Anwar Hussain Shah who teach in different schools in Gujar Khan. The court asked the officials to submit their comments within ten days and put off the hearing till November 7.
Bashir Khan, the counsel for the petitioners, said that the district government had advertised the posts of elementary and secondary schoolteachers and would hold interviews on November 10. The government has ignored the promotion of in-service teachers and is inducting all new teachers on open applications, he said.
Making the two officials and chairman district recruitment committee as respondents, the petitioners maintained that according to a notification of 1991, whenever new recruitments were made 50 per cent of the available posts would be filed through promotion of the serving teachers from the lower cadre. But the education department in its advertisement for the new posts of elementary and secondary teachers has ignored the already serving teachers in the lower cadres.
The lawyers said the district education department had prepared a list of 84 elementary teachers that were to be promoted to secondary level but only 21 of them had been provided the facility. He said the rest of the teachers could also be accommodated through the ongoing process.
The petitioners prayed to the court to stop the process of new recruitments till the disposal of their petition and to direct the respondents to fill 50 per cent of the vacancies from the in-service teachers.
Meanwhile, another bench of the LHC issued notices to the administrator of Army Public School (APS) and the principal of the APS Jarar camp, asking them to submit comments in a petition filed by a citizen whose two sons were expelled from the school allegedly after he refused to sell his land to the school. Justice M.A. Zaffar directed the two respondents to file their comments on November 5, the next hearing date of the petition filed by Raja Nazakat Hussain, a resident of village Bodial, Adiala Road.
Making the ministry of defence through its secretary, the administrator of the APS system and the principal of the school respondents, the petitioner through his attorney Saeed Yosuf Khan maintained that he got admitted his two sons Dilawar Hussain and Mohammad Shameer to class I and II, respectively, in 2007 in the APS Jarar camp that was established near the village after acquiring land from the villagers.
He said his sons showed over 80 per cent results in the examinations and were promoted to the next class. Everything was going according to the routine when the administration of the school started pressing the petitioner and other local inhabitants to sell their inherited land adjacent to the camp on cheap rates. But, he said, the owners refused to sell the land. The petitioner alleged that the school administration in a bid to press him for the sale of his land issued a letter on October 8, saying the names of his two sons had been struck off from the school due to shortage of accommodation. He said he wrote a letter to the defence secretary appealing him to stop the ouster of his sons but received no response.
He prayed to the court to declare null and void the expulsion of his sons from the school and allow them to continue their education. Dawn
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