14,000 teachers regularised as Sindh PA passes law
Imtiaz Ali
Karachi: The Sindh Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a law to regularise 14,000 teachers who were appointed since 2008. Also, Law Minister Ayaz Soomro announced that the provincial government would appoint another 19,000 teachers this year.
MQM’s parliamentary leader Syed Sardar Ahmed supported the ‘Sindh regularisation of teachers appointed on contract basis bill, 2012,’ bill, saying these teachers had been appointed through tests conducted by the prestigious IBA.
Ombudsman gets extension
The MPAs also unanimously passed “the establishment of the office of Ombudsman for the province of Sindh (amendment) bill, 2012’ into law, giving a four-year-extension to the office of the ombudsman.
The law minister said that under the Ombudsman Act of 1991, the governor could appoint the ombudsman for a four-year term only. Now, under this law, the governor could extend the tenure of the incumbent ombudsman for another four years. Soomro said the governor could extend the term on the advice of the chief minister.
National People’s Party’s (NPP’s) Arif Jatoi contended that making the chief minister’s advice binding for the governor could create an “unusual situation” in the future. However, MQM’s Shoaib Bukhari rejected his apprehensions and termed it presumptive. He said it was not an unusual thing at federal level, as the president also made certain appointments on the advice of the prime minister.
Rafiq Engineer said that, in compliance with the 18th Amendment, it was necessary to make such amendments to the Sindh Ombudsman Act of 1991. Another bill was passed to establish a medical institute in Sehawn.
Finance Minister Mural Ali Shah, talking about the aims and objectives of the law, said that the medical institute would be set up in Sehawn Sharif to provide modern and day-to-day medical facilities to the people.
He said Sehawn was an ancient city of Sindh, which had also been its capital in the past. Mausoleum of the Sufi saint Qalandar Shahbaz is located there and hundreds of thousands of people across the country visit it annually.
Murad said two medical institutes had been set up on left side of Indus River in Gambit and Shahdadpur but on right side of the river, there was no medical institute between Larkana and Jamshoro. Thus, there was an urgent need to set up a medical institute in Sehwan.
He said a 70-bed Taluka hospital would be upgraded to 200 beds under this law while a new OPD block would also be set up. A mother-and-child care centre, facilities of dialysis and thalassaemia would be established.
The finance minister became emotional when he said that the medical institute was being named after his late father former chief minister Sindh Abdullah Shah and his eyes welled up. Speaker Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, Law Minister Ayaz Soomro and several MPAs recalled the services rendered by Abdullah Shah.
MQM’s Shoaib Bukhari also supported the bill and congratulated Murad Shah. He said provision of thalassaemia and dialysis centres were imperative as these facilities were not available there.
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