‘Devolution, not dissolution’: NCHD employees rally outside parliament

Urge the govt to safeguard their efforts and resources.

ISLAMABAD:

Employees of the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) continued their protest for the seventh consecutive day here on Thursday.

The protesters, carrying placards and banners, rallied from D-Chowk to Aabpara and demanded the government to safeguard the efforts and resources of NCHD spent during last eight years for the promotion of primary education, literacy and primary healthcare. They urged the government to protect NCHD and help it achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in education.

“We are in the favour of the 18th Amendment and demand the government to devolve NCHD rather than dissolving it,” one of the protesters said.

The closure of NCHD will affect 16,000 employees and their families in 144 districts. Millions of children in underprivileged areas will be deprived from primary education, while millions of adults will remain without functional literacy programs, another protester added.

The employees said the provincial governments should adopt NCHD with its full scale in their respective provinces and if the units are reluctant, the matter should be resolved by the federal government.

They said the government had committed that under the 18th Amendment, not a single employee would be separated from services. More than 100 parliamentarians signed a resolution in favour of NCHD’s continuation. The NCHD employees have also filed a petition in the Supreme Court for enforcement of their fundamental rights.

NCHD has helped enrol 11.56 million out-of-school children aged 5 to 7 years, established 13,068 community feeder schools, provided 4,719 feeder teachers in government schools and trained 146,225 government teachers.

The commission also established 145,411 adult literacy centres, where 3.2 million people were imparted functional literacy, 95 per cent of whom were females. NCHD also trained 13 million women in primary healthcare and screened more than two million children in primary schools for eyesight and hearing impairment.

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