PESHAWAR: A meeting of the board of governors (BoG) of the historic Edwardes College scheduled for Wednesday was postponed while the executive committee meeting of the institution accorded approval to the budget besides taking several other decisions.
The college has been functioning without a regular principal for the last six years owing to a host of reasons, mainly the lethargic attitude of the quarters concerned.The college as per statutes should have two of its senior most faculty members as vice-principals. Among them, the senior one should serve as acting principal. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor, who is also the chairman of the BoG, has already directed the acting principal of the college vide letter No SO (II) 3(1) GS 23/1173 dated July, 2023, to place the name of a senior faculty member before the board as agenda item in its next meeting, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, the executive committee meeting held the other day with Bishop Dioceses of Peshawar in the chair, discussed and approved the annual budget. Another agenda item for the meeting was to frame the recruitment and promotion policy for non-teaching staff, which was referred to a committee for a thorough discussion.
The members and chair insisted that members from the provincial Establishment Department should be included in the committee and the designed policy should be vetted by the departments concerned.
The executive committee, in the previous meeting, had also discussed and okayed a four/five-tier formula for the faculty members of the institution, which could not be presented before the BoG as an agenda item.
The faculty members stressed that the implementation of the four-tier/five-tier formulas in Edwardes College was a genuine right of the teaching staff.The court had issued orders for the regularisation and promotion of some faculty members. However, their cases were not included in the agenda of the board.One of the faculty members said that they had been waiting for their regularisation for the last five years.