Dormancy: Silence before the storm

Pending devolution of education ministry making officials ‘indifferent’ to work.

ISLAMABAD: In the wake of the pending devolution of the education ministry under the 18th Amendment, the functioning of the department has started to suffer. Sources claimed that senior officials of the ministry had adopted an indifferent attitude towards their work.

“Because of the lack of interest of the senior staff, hundreds of official files have been dumped at the secretary office for months,” said an official on condition of anonymity.

The official added that after the announcement of devolution, Secretary Education Muhammad Athar Tahir had started ignoring the affairs and focused on taking foreign trips at government expenditure. “During the last four months, the secretary has made at least five foreign trips to various countries including Tajikistan, England and Korea,” he said. Currently, the secretary is in Geneva.

The officials expressed concern about their future after the ministry is handed over to the provinces. There are also pending projects and other transitional work which is being ignored due to the absence of senior staff.

“It seems difficult to approach the secretary at his office during his stay in Pakistan as he does not bother to have a thorough look at the pending files,” the source said. On the pretext of ‘indifferent’ bosses, even the lower officers are not ‘performing their duties professionally’.

The secretary, who is considered to be ‘a well-connected bureaucrat’, was especially brought in by the education minister Assef Ahmed Ali, “but he (Ali) himself is not satisfied with Tahir’s work,” sources claimed.

Another issue which has been left pending after the announcement of devolution is the teacher’s package. “We are waiting for the notification of the Prime Minister’s package announced on November 8, but there has been no headway due to the attitude of the bureaucracy,” said an official of Islamabad Government Teachers’ Association.

He said they feared that the ministry would not be able to notify the announcement before the eventual devolution.

“We are planning to evolve a mechanism to pressurise the authorities for issuing the notification very shortly and a meeting in this regard will be held on Tuesday,” a member of the association said.  “It is a painful wait for the teachers who are expecting the notification for the last three months. The authorities are not serious about it,” the official said.

Secretary education was not available for comments.

When contacted, PRO of the ministry Saqib Mutaz said that there was no official designated spokesperson to present the ministry’s stance to the media. He added that he was not authorised to speak.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2011.