ISLAMABAD
Over eight pensioners of the National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research are still waiting for payment of their pending retirement dues, since fiscal 2021, while the Institute and its parent bodies like Higher Education Commission and Quaid I Azam University continue trading excuses for non-availability of funds, sources divulged to this scribe recently. Sources revealed that NIHCR’s record shows pensionary dues were cleared only for those who retired up to July 2020. Everyone who had retired since fiscal 2021 had been left stranded.
Five more staffers are due to retire in 2026 and instead of looking forward to retirement, they now dread joining ranks of retirees with no cash in hand, one of the pensioners told this scribe.
As always, the NIHCR authorities plead helplessness, saying its hands are tied by the Higher Education Commission (HEC), whose recurring grant to NIHCR has remained frozen for six years, its real value eaten away by roughly two-thirds through inflation and rupee devaluation.
For the last over five years, the NIHCR has been deplorably facing financial crunch created by the HEC at the one pretext or the other. The NIHCR authorities have repeatedly brought the matter of financial constraints in the knowledge of the HEC high-ups, Ministry of Education and Professional Training and the Vice Chancellor Quaid-i-Azam University to help out NIHCR financially once for all but to no avail.
Ironically, due to apathy of all these stakeholders, pensionary benefits like payment/clearance of gratuity, leave encashment, other allowances like house rent ceiling, frozen since 2021 and medical reimbursements to staff and pensioners are accumulating with no one taking pains to take up the issues with relevant authorities.
Adding insult to injury, the sources disclosed, the ad hoc relief granted to pensioners in the last federal budget lags far behind the increase given to serving employees, doing little to offset inflation that has repeatedly touched record highs. For all those who depend on pension, this is not a bureaucratic technicality rather it is the difference between managing our households and not managing at all, they lamented.
When one retires, he or she expects nothing extraordinary, only the modest dignity of a pension paid on time, a gratuity honestly earned, and leave encashment that was his or her by right, under the rules. For over five years now, half a dozen fellow retirees, are still waiting for payment of their pensionary dues pending/frozen since fiscal 2021.
Let it be said plainly: this is not charity the NIHCR pensioners are begging for. Pension is a vested right, not an ex-gratia favour, protected as a matter of livelihood and dignity under Articles 9 and 14 of the Constitution. It is compensation for a lifetime of service, blood, sweat and toil, and the law does not permit it to be arbitrarily withheld, delayed or reduced. Even the widows and orphans of deceased NIHCR staffers face the same cold indifference for payment of family pension, a right that should never require pleading.
The NIHCR pensioners have appealed to the HEC as well as Ministry of Education authorities to look into the pensioners’ financial affairs and get the NIHCR’s financial backlog cleared without any further delay, to the Ministry of Finance to consider a pensioners’ targeted bailout for the NIHCR to all concerned to treat this as the fundamental-rights issue it truly is, not a budgeting afterthought.
