GILGIT: The Social Action Programme (SAP) teachers continued their protest sit-in here for sixth straight day on Saturday demanding regularisation and payment of withheld salaries.

On Friday, the Gilgit police had arrested 15 teachers, but set them free later that night on bail.

About 200 teachers, including females, from seven districts of the region along with their children have been staging protest sit-in for acceptance of their demands.

Initially, the protesters had blocked the road outside the chief minister`s house from Tuesday to Thursday, and on Friday they shif ted to Gadibagh. Police said that the FIR was registered against the teachers for blocking the road and violating section 144. Later, they were released after an agreement that they would not resort to violence.

Talking to Dawn, the SAP president Gulaam Akbar said that the teachers had been protesting for last five months for their rights. He added that currently 1,464 teachers had been teaching 55,000 students, most of them female, in 756 SAP schools across G-B. The SAP schools were established with the financial assistance of World Bank in 1994, and in 2009 the schools` management was handed over to National E ducation Foundation (NEF).

Gulaam Akbar said that the teachers had accepted working under NEF on the condition that their salaries would be increased and theirservicesregularised.

However, he said that the promises made with teachers were not fulfilled even after passage of many years neither by the regional nor the federal government, which blamed each other for the issue.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Syed Mehdi Shah has blamed the central government for not regularising SAP teachers in G-B.

According to a press release issued here on Saturday, he said that regularisation was the right of SAP teachers as they had been serving in remote areas of G-B. He said the regularisation was a matter of the federal government, adding that his administration had contacted the federal government time and again, but to no effect.-Correspondent