–PLRA claims that only employees who failed to issue unconditional apologies were fired
LAHORE: Instead of meeting the demands of disgruntled employees, the Punjab Land Authority (PLRA) has terminated contracts of 21 employees over their supposed roles in the protests held against the land authority in November.
Well-placed sources in PLRA told Pakistan Today that terminated employees included eight service centre in-charges (SCIs) and 13 service centre officials (SCOs).
PLRA employees had been demanding the establishment of a proper service structure and an increase in their salaries which has led them to hold sporadic protests in the provincial capital over the past three years.
In November, PLRA staff members across the province had staged a 15-day protest which ended after the intervention of Punjab Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Pervez Elahi who promised to have the issue resolved within the next two months.
According to sources, the authority expelled only those employees who failed to issue an unconditional apology regarding their roles in the protests.
PLRA Director Operation and Coordination has also issued a notification which barred the terminated SCIs and SCOs from entering premises of any Arazi Record Centre (ARC) to prevent “any loss of public records/property,” sources said.
The terminated SCIs and SCO include the following names: Tayyab Bashir, Qaisar Mehmood, Kashif Ali, Nadeem Abbas, Naeem Ashraf, Hassan Bilal, Inaam Subhani, Naqqash Ahmed, Muhammad Imran, Hassan Mir, Muhammad Gulzar Khaliq, Muhammad Afzal, Arslan Haider, Qamar Ibrahim, Saddam Hussain, Mian Shahid Mehmood, Tasawawr Iqbal, Sher Muhammad, Zaheer Abbas, Muhammad Zain and Mehwish Khalid.
Commenting on the issue PLRA Director-General Sajjad Ahmed said, “We had started working for the development of a service structure after the formulation of the PLRA constitution which has taken the demands of the employees into consideration.”
“So there was no need of protesting over a process which had already been taken up,” he said.
“The other demand was a raise in salary. All employees had accepted the contract letters on lump sum salaries so there was no sense in protesting on what they had agreed upon. The board agreed to their demands that as the cost of living has increased therefore some increase in the salary should also be made. The board cannot take decision of increasing salaries on its own as the finance department is also involved in the process and it is a matter of utilizing government money. The employees were told several times that there protest was illegal but they did not stop,” he added.
“They had no right to hamper daily lives of general public by staging a sit-in in the middle of the city. If they thought that the authority was being unfair to them they should have approached the court. The behavior of the employees was unpardonable and those whom we have expelled were the ones who had failed to make unconditional apologies,” he concluded.
