NADRA Employees Want to Regularized as Per Federal Government Rules

The 90 per cent employees of NADRA are hired on a contract basis. The employees have not received any increment in their salaries for the last four years, as announced by the government from time to time. It is very difficult to survive in such a situation, particularly when inflation is increasing while NADRA employees' salary has remained frozen from the beginning, I said NADRA Employees Welfare Association, Pakistan in a statement on Saturday. The NADRA was founded in 2000 to collect data of Pakistanis with biometric and other technology. The United Nations and other foreign agencies funded the government to furnish and provide state-of-the-art technologies to NADRA.

The authority has registered 87% Pakistanis with tremendous hard work of the employees and successfully collected data from rural areas through mobile registration vans and other data acquisition units. All security agencies, banks and many other departments are depending on NADRA's database. Shaheed Benazir Bhutto had announced in her party's manifesto that the NADRA department would be directly controlled by the government of Pakistan through the Ministry of Interior and its employees would be regularized. But the bureaucracy that the Shaukat Aziz government had pampered is still occupying seats in the administration and is refusing to implement the policy of the democratic government.

The authorities have announced special timings for NADRA staff (from 08:00AM to 11:00PM --12 hours -- without any compensation or overtime and Saturday is also working Day) that is not followed at any other government/semi-government department. The government has announced that contract employees shall be given salary, allowances and other privileges equivalent to regular employees but the same are not implemented by NADRA authorities. Our appeal to the president is that all NADRA employees must be regularized and treated as permanent employees of the Ministry of Interior. Why is there a delay after the announcement of the prime Minister of Pakistan?