LAHORE - Hundreds of teachers of the Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB) Education Wing are suffering badly as they have not been paid for the past three months while Eid is just around the corner.
The teachers on Monday staged a sit-in outside the ETPB office against the non-payment of salaries. Some of them climbed up on the nearby pole but they came down after the promise by the incumbent acting chairman of ETPB Chaudhary Riaz of paying them one month salary today (Tuesday).
A teacher, talking about their plight, told this correspondent that about 1,500 teaching and non-teaching staff of ETPB Education Wing was waiting for their salaries for three months because the new government was not ready to pay salaries to the employees.
He said hundreds of teaching and non-teaching staff of five educational institutions of the ETPB including Ayesha Siddiqa Degree College, Railway Station Lahore, Nawaz Sharif High School, Railway Station, Trust Model Public High School, Maulana Ahmad Ali Road, Ravi Road Lahore, Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Higher Secondary Girls School and Dr Mateen Fatima Higher Secondary School, Shahdara have not been paid the salaries.
The teacher, requesting anonymity, said the government had sacked the 89-day contractual employees without paying their salaries of five months. And, he said, now the government was planning to sack hundreds of teachers just because they had been hired in the period of former ETPB chairman Asif Hashmi.
He said the former government had promised many times to regularise the services of the teachers but to no avail.