Students migrating to cities for education

Govornment-appointed teachers ‘hiring’ local unemployed persons to work on their behalf.

MUZAFFARABAD: Hundreds of students and their parents from rural areas in Azad Kashmir are forced to migrate to urban areas in hopes of better results for their sons and daughters in annual examinations in the wake of a steep decline in the standard of education in institutions in their respective areas because of the absence of teaching staff.

It seems just providing new buildings which are fully furnished and equipped with latest teaching aids like computers is not enough to contain the falling standards in Azad Kashmir.

It has been noted that staff recruited to serve in rural areas either do not go or hire local people to work on their behalf for a few thousand rupees a month – a system popularly known as ‘theka’.

“I have shifted my entire family to Muzaffarabad from Gharthma village for the sake of better education for my three sons. Colleges near our village are incapable of providing proper education,” said Zaman Abbasi, who is living in a small house in Muzaffarabad.

Officials of the World Food Programme (WFP), which distributes ghee and other food items among primary school children, to increase their enrolment in Azad Kashmir, have also attributed falling attendance to absence of teachers and the tendency of government-appointed teachers to ‘hire’ local unemployed persons to perform duty on their behalf.

Reconstruction of huge educational facilities in remote areas have had no impact on the performance of students which can be gauged by decreasing number of students passing their annual examinations. Local people say that most children were ‘promoted’ to higher classes without passing their exams and accused teachers of just being interested in annual increments and promotions.

“Only 10 per cent of students in post-graduate colleges passed this year. When teachers are reluctant to educate their own children at government-run institutions, where they themselves teach, why should they expect other children to study there?” asked Prof Rafi Lone, who teaches at the Government College, Hattain Bala.

In some rural areas, college students hardly study for even one period in the entire day.

“I am planning to shift to Islamabad because there is no regular teaching system in the nearby Chinari town’s college,” said 19-year-old Abdul Qabeer, who studies arts.

Successive government, people said, recruited more than 3,000 teachers in Azad Kashmir to appease their political supporters, adding that these teachers are more involved in politics than teaching for which they are being paid.

The Azad Kashmir Education Department is by far the state’s largest department: it employs half of 70,000 employees in the entire state.

Despite having such a large workforce it is unable to arrest the decline in the standard of education, which encourages private schools to flourish.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2010.