SAHIWAL: Provincial chapter of the Commerce Professors and Lecturers Association (CPLA) has demanded regularisation of 1,000 contract teachers and clerical staff whose services were placed under the Higher Education Department (HED) under the Contract Policy 2004.

Previously they were working under the Technical Education andVocationalTrainingAuthority (Tevta).

The association at a meeting held here on Wednesday said the services of these teachers andother staff were placed under HED some 25 months back on the recommendation of the chief minister and they were still awaiting regularisation.

These employees have been facing a number of problems, including late payment of salaries, nonimplementation of annual increments and denial of allowances being drawn by other government employees.

CPLA has threatened to stage a sit-in in front of the Punjab Assembly for acceptance of their demands by middle of this month.

Mirza Javed Iqbal, the CPLA provincial president, said out of them 530 were working as gazetted employees.He said as per rules, the recruitment for commerce education and its non-teaching cadre was done under Section (4) of Tevta Ordinance, while their service structure was also being determined by the authority rules.

He said in 2010 on chief minister`s recommendations, the provincial government policy was changed and commerce education was transferred from Tevta to HED.

He said at that time around 2,700 employees (in gazetted and non-gazetted categories) were working under Tevta, out which 1,000 were contract-based. Under the new arrangement, the commerce teachers cadre was broughtunder HED service structure.

He said technically this was done through a notification (Tevta/GM/0/36/1672) dated July 5, 2010, duly signed by then Tevta chairman Saeed Ahmed Alvi.

Mirza Iqbal says the contract staff`s miseries started when they were absorbed in HED.

He says despite their absorption in the HED neither their service was regularised nor their salaries were being paid from the department`s account.

`Still we (contract employees) are getting salary from Tevta account,` he added.

`This created a huge problem for many of them as they were neither getting their salaries on aregular basis nor they were given any allowances,` he says.

The allowances they are being denied include house rent, connivance allowance, medical allowance, big city allowance and 30pc lieu in pension, says CPLA divisional president Imtiaz Nayyar.

Sources say many of these employees have been getting their salary after a delay of one or two months for the last two years.

They say some of them are yet to receive their salary for the months of August and October.

Mirza Javed Iqbal says the CPLA proposal for regularisation of these employees had been shuttling from one bureaucrat to other for the last 25 months.