KOHAT, April 4: Teachers have been avoiding posting in the restive Hangu district, thereby leaving almost all the government schools understaffed and thousands of students at the mercy of terror groups for the last one decade.

Due to worsening law and order situation, about 250 teachers of high schools posted in Hangu over the last few years have got themselves transferred to other districts. The local students have been left in the lurch because the lengthy government policy of inducting teachers through Public Service Commission also takes months to select and post the education staff in various parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“Due to terrorist activities in the area the Senior English Teachers (SET) – usually responsible for teaching 9th and 10th grade students – start trying to get transferred to another district within a month of posting, which is why the number of vacant posts in high schools has increased during the past decade. Fresh teachers also hesitate to serve in Hangu and they use all resources to avoid posting in the area,” the executive district officer of education, Hangu, Jan Mohammad, told Dawn.

He said that that they had been sending monthly reports about vacant posts and other problems to the provincial education directorate while in the meanwhile junior certified teachers (CT) were given the task to take care of the classes in about 20 high schools. He said that there was deficiency of teachers of all cadres in Hangu schools, but the SET posts were vacant in 20 of the 45 high schools.

Mr Jan hoped that most of the vacant posts would be filled by September, but at the same time there was no guarantee that the newly-appointed teachers would stay in Hangu if the security situation did not improve.

The situation in other government departments and hospitals was also not satisfactory where non-governmental organisations had come forward to fill the gap. The government servants also frequently skip their duties on the plea that the Kohat-Hangu highway was not safe for travel to and from their destination.

The emergency unit of the only civil hospital in Hangu, which receive scores of victims of attacks on passenger vehicles on Parachinar highway and blasts, has been already been taken by an international NGO.

MNA from Hangu, Pir Haider Ali Shah told a delegation the other day that he had informed Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti about the problems of people. The delegation told the MNA that there was a deficiency of 70 per cent teaching staff in all the government schools of Hangu.

Due to weak writ of the government in Hangu and the adjacent Orakzai and Kurram Agencies and unsafe Parachinar highway, the business community and other residents had already left Hangu and settled in Peshawar, Kohat, Kashmir and Punjab.