NADRA workers threaten protest from tomorrow

LAHORE:

The National Registration and Database Authority (NADRA) employees have announced a country-wide protest including boycott of work in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa from Friday (tomorrow), The Express Tribune has learnt.

NADRA Punjab Union president Naveed Ahmad Arain said their protest would continue till the management withdrew transfer orders and show-cause notices issued to union members for leading protestors at a token hunger strike camps in support of a pay raise demand. He said if the government continued to ignore their demonstrations the employees would organise a march towards the head office in Islamabad on March 9.

Arain said instead of addressing their grievances the management was employing high-handed tactics to suppress their movement for a fair wage. He said he was issued a show-cause notice seeking an explanation for “instigating NADRA workers to abandon their official work and to join a token hunger strike.” Another NADRA worker, Ghulam Mustafa, said he received a similar notice seeking an explanation for his participation in a protest in front of the Lahore Press Club. Mustafa said data entry officer (DEO) jobs in other governmental departments were in basic pay scale (BPS)-12. In NADRA, however, the position was in BPS-7.

Additionally, NADRA was not paying its DEOs less than the Rs12,000 minimum wage set by the government for BPS-7. He said NADRA staff had increased from around 17,000 to at least 22,000 in the last three years of the previous government.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 26^th, 2015.