LARKANA: In order to complete inquiries against illegal and ghost workers in various districts of the province, Sindh School Education and Literacy Department Secretary Abdul Aziz Uqaili has written a letter to Health Department Secretary Fazlullah Pechuho for providing last 17 years’ record of medical fitness certificates (MFCs) issued to the Education Department employees.
In the letter, Uqaili said that there had been several complaints and reports of illegal and fake entries of irrelevant and unauthorised people in the payroll of the department during the last few years.
Most of these cases were unearthed after introduction of biometric system in departments during 2015-16. The personal IDs of more than 3,000 such suspected persons and ghost employees were blocked and their salaries stopped in 2015-16. A few of them had filed constitutional petitions (CP) for the release of their salaries, while others preferred to remain silent, knowing their dubious and fraudulent entry into the department, the letter added. Uqaili further wrote that in CP No D-6925 in the Sindh High Court, service record and documents of 80 petitioners were scrutinised on the orders of the court. The department submitted a report in the court on August 29, 2017, in which 61 out of 80 petitioners were declared ‘fake’, while five were regarded as either ‘fake’ or ‘ghost’ employees, the letter added. The fate of the remaining employees is yet to be decided as the inquiry continues.
The role of the Naushahro Feroze medical superintendent (MS) and civil surgeon in verification of such employees’ medical fitness certificates was crucial, without which the department would have faced challenges in reaching a conclusion of the said inquiry, Uqaili wrote. Now, the department is proceeding further to finalise more than 500 such cases in Naushahro Feroze and similar blocked ID cases in almost all districts of Sindh, particularly Matiari, Qambar Shahdadkot, Jacobabad, Shikarpur and Dadu.
The facilitation and support of the Health Department will be essential to conclude all those inquiries, he further wrote.
Uqaili requested the health secretary to advise all medical superintendents of Sindh to provide a scanned copy of the register containing basic information of all MFCs issued to prospective employees of the Education Department since January 1, 2000, to date. According to the information received, Bisma Shah, deputy director at the Directorate General of HR and Training, will contact them personally and arrange scanning of the record at the local level.
In this way, record of the Health Department pertaining to employees of the Education Department will be preserved electronically for future references. Following the letter, the health secretary has issued instructions to all medical superintendents to provide the relevant record.
Published in Daily Times, September 26th 2017.
