By IANS
Islamabad : Government school teachers in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) tasked to perform election duty fear for their security despite assurances that the army would be deployed to assist police and other security personnel at polling stations, a media report Thursday said.
“Interviews with the teachers who have been assigned duties at various polling stations in Peshawar show that majority of them are reluctant to perform duty for security concerns,” Dawn said.
“If someone is out to attack or blow himself up at the polling station, no security man could stop him,” it quoted a primary teacher as saying, who added that the presence of law-enforcement agencies could not ensure the security of the polling staff.
Provincial Election Commissioner Akhtar Hussain Sabir told Dawn that 8,156 polling stations would be set up in the NWFP and FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and almost the same number of presiding officers would be performing duties at these polling stations. Each polling station would have 13 election staff on poll day, he added.
“The teachers who performed duty in the previous elections said that election staff was not properly trained. They complained that they had not been provided food and transport facilities,” Dawn said.
“We depended often on the locals and candidates for such facilities. The daily allowance provided to the polling staff was paid after a long time,” one teacher was quoted as saying.
According to Sabir, each polling staffer was paid Rs.175 per day during the three day polling process in 2002 for a total of Rs.450. An extra Rs.200 was also paid as diet allowance.
“A primary schoolteacher was of the view that although medical leave was not allowed and therefore they would attend the assigned polling station, yet the election staff would be performing the duty half-heartedly,” Dawn said.
“The provincial election commissioner said that if anyone was not able to perform duty owing to a health problem, a replacement would be provided from the reserved staff,” the newspaper added.