PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has decided to regularise the services of the employees associated with health-related projects in the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (now merged tribal districts).

The cabinet had decided about the regularisation of ex-Fata residents only.

However, most of those to be regularised are from settled districts as per the health department’s recommendations, according to officials.

They told Dawn that the chief minister had asked the health department to conduct a verification exercise regarding the employees in tribal districts.

Most of them belong to settled districts

The officials said the health department completed verification regarding physical presence of the employees in various projects and the finance department would create 1,567 regular positions to make their services permanent.

They said the regularisation process began after the employees appealed to the chief minister for permanent jobs.

Theofficialssaid the chief minister asked the health department to initiate work to convert the temporary employees to regular ones.

They said the health secretary told the cabinet in a meeting on Oct 24 that in line with a Peshawar High Court decision, coupled with recommendations of the departmental scrutiny committee, the health department laid the matter before the cabinet on August 29 this year.

The secretary said the department had recommended conditional creation of 1,567 regular positions of various projects under the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Regularisation of Services of Employees of Erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas) Act, 2021 and 2022.

The cabinet approved the creation of the required positions with the condition that the health department will ensure the verification of physical presence of the project employees for which the positions are being created, according to officials.

They said the finance department would conditionally create the positions after verification of physical presence by the health department.

The officials said that positions were to be created for the project employees who were the domicile holders of tribal districts.

They said for the purpose, a committee constituted by the health department, in a meeting on Oct 9, decided to form district level sub committees under the relevant district health officers, Independent Monitoring Unit of the health department, representatives of relevant deputy commissioners, and relevant programme managers for proper scrutiny of the employees.

The committee completed the scrutiny of 1,520 employees and 335 of them were non-tribal domicile holders.

However, the employees without domiciles from tribal districts appealed to the chief minister to reconsider the condition regarding ex-Fata domiciles.

They argued that as per Section 3 of the Regularisation Act, employees were defined as those appointed on contract basis to project posts in erstwhile Fata without mentioning the domicile restrictions.

The health department processed the appeal on a summary through the law department, saying there is no provision in the Act that only those employees having domicile of ex-Fata will be regularised and the Act is totally silent in this regard.

The chief minister placed their appeal before the cabinet for consideration, which in light of the relevant provisions decided to accept the appeal of employees by relaxing the condition regarding conditional creation of posts only for ex-Fata domiciled employees.

Officials said that it had also been decided that the employees regularised against the project posts in erstwhile Fata would be bound to serve there “in the public interest.”

They said the CM’s Secretariat had sought an implementation report from the cabinet decision on a priority basis.

The officials said that the employees had been recruited on a contractual basis for different health projects, including those dealing with immunisation, mother and child healthcare, and tuberculosis.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2024