Sindh education department orders action against 157 ghost employees

An investigation has revealed that 157 ghost employees of the Sindh School Education Department are residing abroad without informing authorities.

Actions against these employees have been ordered within two days.

The Secretary of School Education has been recommended to terminate the services of these 157 ghost employees, including absentee teachers and other staff.

Following this recommendation, the Secretary has directed the dismissal of all absent employees.

The FIA and departmental inquiries discovered that these 157 employees have been living abroad while still receiving their salaries. The DG Monitoring reported that these ghost employees were residing abroad without taking leave and have continued to draw their salaries. Evidence of foreign travel for 76 of these ghost employees was provided by the FIA.

The Director General also held directors, DEOs, and TEOs responsible for not reporting the absence of these employees.

A new official report released on August 24 revealed that Pakistan's education delivery system has become dysfunctional and all the 134 districts barring Islamabad were lagging on indicators ranging from learning outcomes to public financing.

The findings of the Planning Commission's District Education Performance Index Report 2023 underscored the human resource crisis in Pakistan where people are entering into job markets either with no or low education. For many, the crisis was worse than the economic crisis.

The report showed that Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) outperformed Punjab in education system's governance and management. But Punjab was far ahead on the index of building education infrastructure.

These two outcomes reflect the priorities of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N).

The report was launched by the United Kingdom High Commissioner to Pakistan, Jane Marriott, and the Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal. It showed that Pakistan's map was red on the performance indicators of education learning outcomes and public financing.

All the districts of the country fell in the categories of medium –facing significant gaps in the education delivery system to low –the ones struggling to perform. The report said that the districts were suffering because of poor governance, highly poor learning outcomes and inadequate allocation of budgets.

None of Pakistan's 134 districts could get the rating of high performing in the education sector. Out of 134 districts, 133 fell in the category of medium to low, according to the District Education Performance Index Report.

The average 53.46 score means Pakistan's all districts were struggling with a dysfunctional education delivery system and required urgent attention to address gaps in basic requirements for education outcomes.

The districts having medium score are the ones that are facing significant gaps leading to compromised outputs and needing serious attention to improve service delivery.

Also, 80% of the out-of-the-school children have never gone to the school and the parents had strong perception of poor quality education in the public sector.

"The learning domain index also paints a very sorry state of affairs as the whole map is red," Rafiullah Kakar, Member Social Sector of the Planning Commission, said. "The share of the education budget in the provincial development budgets is also highly inadequate. Up to 90% of the current budget for the education sector goes to paying salaries," he added.

Pakistan's national average score in the District Education Performance report is 53.46, placing the country in the low performance category.

The education sector was assessed on the basis of five indicators. Among these five domains, infrastructure & access scores the highest at 58.95, indicating some progress in expanding educational opportunities.