PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Service Tribunal has declared engineers of all government departments entitled to technical allowance equivalent to 1.5 times of their initial basic pay. A bench comprising tribunal chairman Kaleem Arshad Khan and member Rashida Bano accepted 13 appeals filed by engineers, mostly of agriculture and excise departments, against the provision of the technical allowance to officials of four departments only. It declared that the effect of the notification issued by the finance secretary on Oct 19, 2018, be deemed for engineers of all departments in line with a decision of the provincial cabinet. Advocate Arbab Saiful Kamal appeared for most of the appellants and said that his clients worked as engineers in different departments. It accepts appeals against technical allowance for four departments only He said that a cabinet meeting on May 24, 2018, approved technical allowance at the rate of 1.5 times of the initial basic pay scale to all engineers working under the provincial government departments with effect from July 2018. The lawyer said that on Oct 18, 2018, a summary was moved to the then chief minister for directing the finance department to immediately issue a notification of the earlier cabinet decision, but after approval, the same was allowed for only communication and works, irrigation, public health engineering and local government departments, with engineers of other departments being excluded. He said that the appellants had also filed representations to the government requesting for inclusion of engineers of all other departments for the provision of the said allowance, but in vain. Mr Kamal argued that the impugned notification was discriminatory and illegal. He contended that once the cabinet had given approval for the provision of technical allowance to engineers of all the government departments, the chief minister had no authority to allow the same to only four of the departments and exclude engineers of remaining departments. The tribunal ruled that it was astonishing to note that when once the cabinet had rendered its decision, how the chief minister could supersede the decision of the cabinet without its approval by ordering the issuance of the notification, limiting the grant of the technical allowance to engineers of four departments only. “Records weren’t produced to show that the decision of the provincial cabinet was modified. Instead, the then chief minister limited it to four departments only. Since the government comprises the chief minister and the cabinet, the chief minister alone could not have modified the decision of the cabinet,” it declared. The tribunal said a Supreme Court judgement declared that the prime minister was head of the cabinet, but he didn’t stand in the position of the cabinet and couldn’t exercise its powers by himself. The tribunal observed that the apex court had further ruled that decisions of the federal government were the decisions of the cabinet and not of the prime minister. It added that the function of the chief executive was to execute and implement the policy decisions taken by the cabinet i.e. the federal government and the prime minister could not take decisions by himself. The tribunal also referred to another court judgement, which declared that the provincial government would connote the chief minister and provincial ministers taken together, which meant that the decision by the provincial government had to be taken by the cabinet as a whole as mentioned in Article 130 of the Constitution.