LAHORE: In less than 24 hours, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s decision to spare teachers from census duties has been withdrawn, apparently on the intervention of the finance division led by Ishaq Dar.

The schoolteachers will now be participating in the census training from Monday (tomorrow).

Presiding over a meeting to review Education Sector Reforms on Friday, the chief minister had asserted that teachers should not be assigned the census duties beginning from March 15 and added that the teachers should concentrate on their teaching responsibilities.

As the chief minister had also directed that the human resource from other departments would be engaged in census activities, a school education department additional secretary wrote a letter to all chief executive officers (CEOs) of respective district education authorities (DEAs) across the province telling that “no teacher shall perform census duty nor get training already scheduled in this regard”.

Since the decision to hold the sixth population and housing census and consequent duties was taken in the Council of Common Interests (CCI), sources said the finance division intervened and asserted that there should be no change in the plan of fulfilling the national commitment – after a delay of eight years.

Chief Secretary retired Capt Zahid Saeed on Saturday evening held a meeting with the civil bureaucracy concerned and Pakistan Bureau of Statistics officers and decided to withdraw the instructions sent to the CEOs of the district education authorities.

Since most of around 43,000 census enumerators have been nominated from the school education department, the meeting decided that all nominated teachers, who have yet not been assigned duties to conduct the Class-V and VIII exams, will participate in the census training.

Govt retreats on decision

Though the meeting planned to explore the possibility of nominating enumerators from other public departments, it decided that it would not be possible to withdraw all schoolteachers from the national duty. “The upcoming census enumeration will not purely be a school education department show, still some percentage of schoolteachers will be spared to perform the census duty,” the meeting resolved.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics will conduct four-day training of the enumerators in batches of 40 persons each.

Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2017