Educational problems are increasing day by day and the public sector education quality is decreasing after the passage of time. After the announcement by the government to provide free text books to the government schools, from the last 4 years the condition of the education has more worsened. It can be better judged that there is no single example of a union council in whole province, where the complete sets of books are provided to all the students in that particular union council. Thousand of the vacant posts of teachers has resulted in closure of schools and the department failed to reopen them temporarily, thousands posts laying vacant on primary, middle, high and higher secondary level. Hundreds of schools are running without any principal or head teacher. On one hand there is free hand to the private sector education, while on other hand the public sector education is ignored.
One third of students currently studying in government schools have no books, and the sets provided are incomplete. No single set of the text book is available in market so that the parents could purchase it for their children. Hundreds of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who are trying hard to educate the children specially the girls in the remote and fare flung areas of the province are not yet provided free books after the decision of the government last year. They are rolling between the Provision of Free Text Book Project (PFTB) and NWFP Text Book Board.
The rapidly changing policies of the department have increased frustration of the poor parents. The recent example of changing the uniform is an additional burden on parents in these hard days. The parents of more than 2.4 million boys’ students in different levels of the school would bear more than 11 billion rupees to purchase new uniform. This amount is almost triple of the budget allocated for the free books by the government. The other decision is to change the session and conduct the examination in March next year. Especially in those parts of the province, where the winter vacations for 2 and half months are given, the study there would be mostly suffered in such situation where the books distribution is still awaiting.
One can easily imagine the destruction in education, in the 2005 earthquake about 8000 schools demolished in which the low quality construction was also a factor killing about 16000 died and thousand of children injured and handicapped. The quake has completed 3 years, but the slow pace of work will take decades to reconstruct the schools. In tribal areas and district Swat hundreds of the schools are set to fire and blasted, due to which thousands of students mostly girls are forced to keep themselves away from education. The negative propaganda against the girl’s education has also helped the girls to dropout from schools and remains in homes. Some 15 thousand girls in the rural areas discontinued their education, when government stopped funds for the 204 Community Primary Schools run by government last year. And most recently the closure of NCHD, about two thousand of feeder schools are closed resulting hundreds thousand students future to darkness. The government did not provide any alternate plan to keep the children in schools. In Kurram Agency the schools are closed since last one year due to sectarian fighting and in
The political leadership of the province should sense the situation and adopt the friendly policies, other wise, we would never be able to educate our nation. The targets of the Education for All (EFA), the government plan to 100% enrollment by 2010 or the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in which we have missed out some targets already and still lagging behind, all these goals will only remain dreams and false promises with our nation and international community.
Ibrash Pasha
Regional Manager, Khwendo Kor Dir
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