The statement was issued on April Fools’ Day. That means the Ministry of Planning was perpetrating a cruel joke on the people of Pakistan. But no! wildly imputable as it is the government is serious. The details given in the plan are interesting, and require, at least, one serious reading.
According to the “working paper,” prepared by the Ministry of Planning, the implementation strategy has been distributed among all stakeholders: all four provincial governments and other territories under the government of Pakistan. The paper says that from April 1 to 30, the federal and provincial governments will do their utmost to get 100% primary school children enrolled.
The provinces will run enrolment campaigns under the leadership of their chief ministers. Before we go through further details, let’s see who are these provincial chief executives who will execute this plan. What have been their priorities, and what have they done so far for the cause of education?
First of all, the chief minister of Punjab, whose party the Pakistan Muslim League-N is ruling the roost at the Centre also. How much importance is given to education by the Punjab CM is evident from the fact that recently almost all development funds for the education and health sectors were diverted to the Orange-line Metro Train (OMT) project in Lahore to avoid suspension of work on the project. The opposition parties stated in the Punjab Assembly recently that the funds for 611 education and health sector projects, approved in the annual budget, had been given over for completion of the OMT project.
A cursory look at the development projects in Punjab shows that the chief minister is interested only in big road and mass transit schemes in Lahore. The OMT project, signal-free corridor (Jail Road), canal road extension in Lahore city would cost the people of Punjab Rs. 210 billion. Lahore Ring Road project is being completed at a cost of over Rs. 29 billion. The Rawalpindi Metro Bus project’s cost is Rs. 45 billion.
But where is education on this priority list? The Punjab chief minister must know that Article 25-A has not been implemented in his province yet, that binds the government to provide free education to all children in the age group of 5 to 16 years. According to the Annual State of Education Report 2015, over 15% of children between ages of five and 16 are still out of school. The standard of education being imparted to children is not satisfactory at all. The report shows that 30% children in grade five are unable to read a grade two-level text in Urdu. Tens of hundreds of schools lack basic facilities. In such circumstances, how would the chief minister enrol all children in schools is better known to the chief minister or the other authorities concerned.
The situation seems equally difficult for the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa chief executive also. Only 1,605 educational institutions, out of a total 3,669 extensively damaged in the 2005 earthquake, have been rebuilt and over 2,000 still await attention of the chief executive of the province. Also, according to an Alif Ailaan report issued in December 2015, 75% of out-of-school children in KP have never been to school.
The report says that despite tall claims, the KP chief minister has failed to impose an education emergency in the province with 26,500 schools still lacking basic facilities and the Tameer-e-School Progamme is yet to materialise. At least 10,000 schools do not have electricity, 7,500 are without drinking water, 5,000 lack boundary walls and 4,000 have no washroom. The education minister recently admitted that some 159 schools had been closed in different parts of the province, mostly because of non-availability of teaching staff. The PTI-led provincial government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has always claimed making education a top priority, but even the chief minister and his team would not know how to enrol all out-of-school children in a one month time period.
However, the federal minister’s claim may not worry the Sindh chief minister as he has seldom made any claim about education promotion. It doesn’t bother him at all that almost half the children, under five years of age, are facing malnutrition in his province, that the percentage of out-of-school children in Sindh is the highest in Pakistan, and that the problem of over 40,000 ghost teachers and 5,229 ghost schools are un-addressed in the province.
It also may not bother him that around 60% schools in his province are without drinking water facility, 40% without electricity and 35% without any boundary wall. So asking him as to how would he enrol the out-of-school children would be an irrelevant question for him.
The Balochistan government, being run by a coalition dominated by the PML-N, has already shown its helplessness to improve the state of education in the province. Data shared by Sardar Raza Muhammad Barrech, advisor to Balochistan chief minister on education, reveals that almost half of the population of the province does not have access to education.
He informed a session of the provincial assembly a few months back that there are only 12,500 schools — 7,000 amongst them with only one room and one teacher — for over 22,000 human settlements spread across the province. The enrolment rate amongst boys is no more than 35% and the figure decreases by 50% as far as girls are concerned. While 1.1m children receive primary education, only 50,000 manage to complete matriculation. A mere 30,000 students go on to receive higher education.
With these official facts and figures, it is anybody’s guess how the chief executive could be successful in bringing all children to school in just one month. Barrech believes that the province requires Rs. 25 billion to bridge the massive gap between what is being delivered and what is actually required.
However, the Ministry of Planning’s idea of engaging the university students in the campaign is good one. The youth have not only energy but passion for doing something worthwhile for the country. Their involvement in running the campaign, even in far-off regions of the country could produce good results. According to the plan, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) will seek help from the university student volunteers to go to villages and katchi abadis for getting out-of-school children enrolled.
Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal believes the National Enrolment Drive would produce desired results. He says the idea emanated from a previous experience of the similar nature, organised on International Literacy Day on September 8, 1999. It was decided to enrol 10 lakh out-of-school children, and 876,000 were enrolled during the campaign.
The minister says that Gilgit-Baltistan is a mountainous region, but has better enrolment status than the other provinces. In areas like Diamer, it is impossible to open girls’ schools, and 75 home schools have been opened for girls. G-B is facing problems of resettlement of the internally displace persons (IDPs), and their children are also accommodated in our schools. As an incentive, the G-B government has given a subsidy in wheat to those families which send their children to schools.
Ahsan Iqbal says that the Azad Jammu and Kashmir government is fully committed to launching the enrolment drive with the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) partnership, and the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) is working in four districts.
Also, an education emergency has been declared in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where children in the age bracket of four to nine years are 100,000, whereas 400,000 children have been enrolled and 600,000 children are out of school with enrolment of 8,000 new children in schools, and the net enrolment ratio will be raised to 45%.
The Planning and Development minister should be well aware of the fact that retention of students is more important than enrolment. He must get a study conducted to know how many children enrolled during the special campaign launched in 2009, had passed their matriculation and how many had dropped out and at what stages. The findings of the study would definitely help the minister prepare a better working paper on the issue.
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