OUR STAFF REPORTER
SIALKOT
Hundreds of housewives and PTI activists staged a protest demonstration in Sialkot city against the loadshedding of gas for domestic consumers.
The women also staged a sit-in there. They were holding banners and placards, and also chanting anti-government slogans. The women said that the people residing in most of the congested residential, industrial and commercial areas of Sialkot, Daska, Sambrial, Uggoki, Kotli Loharaan and Pasrur were facing great ordeal due to prolonged gas loadshedding and very low pressure whenever it is supplied.
They expressed grave concern over this critical situation. The consumers said that up to 20-hour loadshedding of gas daily had made their lives very miserable. PTI female leaders including Aliya Hina Advocate, Syeda Farah Azami and Nusrat Jamshaid Malik said that the loadshedding of gas and its low pressure were badly irking the domestic consumers in Sialkot district.
The affected domestic consumers said that the gas pressure often goes low in the morning and evening daily due to which they were unable to timely prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner. The students of schools and colleges were found going to get education without having breakfast, they said.
“Everyone was living a very perturbed life now-a-days”, they said. Some women said that they remained sleepless during the nights as they had to cook meal to be used in the mornings and evenings.
Parents irked as students turn into sweepers: Parents have expressed their concerns over the vacant posts of sweepers at Govt Girls Primary School Gull Bahaar Khurd as the students have been performing the cleanliness duties in and around the school for the last two and half years.
The situation was totally negating the Punjab government’s claim “Come and see, how, we have been promoting the quality education”. The school management claimed that it was students-friendly school.
The parents said that the school management daily deputes several minor students on the “duty” for a day, as they have to keep the entire school building and its surrounding area clean. They added that the practice was repeated every day with other school students by turns. The parents strongly criticised the school management, and said that they had repeatedly urged the admin to recruit sweepers and not to make the minor students sweepers.
They said that they send their daughters to school for getting education and not for making them sweepers. They urged Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and others to look into the matter.
When contacted, the school management admitted the mismanagement, saying that the school has no sweeper. The school management claimed that it had repeatedly brought the situation into the notice of high-ups of the Education Department but no recruitment or appointment of any sweeper has yet been made in the school.