Atif Khan failed to fix schools in home constituency

A fraction of schools are still without power, clean drinking water and boundary walls

When the PTI took over the government in K-P over five years ago, it had identified education at the top of its agenda. Its provincial education minister was the tip of that spear, leading the charge to improve education in the province.  But after five years, he failed to fix all the schools in his own constituency.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) former education minister in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Atif Khan, while submitting his asset declaration forms to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), had provided a list of the work he had done for his constituents.



This included providing basic facilities in schools such as drinking water, furniture, boundary walls, introduce bio-metric teacher attendance systems, establish girls model school, a home economics College for girls, a woman university, an engineering university and the first girl's cadet college.

While he delivered on most of those promises especially the biometric attendance system and creating the first cadet college for girls, he did struggle in his promise to provide clean drinking water, furniture and boundary walls for schools, with hundreds of schools in his native Mardan still without basic facilities.

For the upcoming elections, Atif is contesting from two seats on PTI tickets, a national assembly seat of NA-21 Mardan-II and a provincial assembly seat of PK-50 Mardan-III.

According to data available with The Express Tribune, there are 1,755 government schools in Mardan. Of these, 1,002 schools (around 56 per cent) are for boys and only 794 schools (44 per cent) are for girls.

At the primary level, there are 1,359 schools of which 760, or 56 per cent, are for boys and 600, or 44 per cent, are for girls.

Out of the 168 middle schools in the district, 79 are for boys and 99 are for girls. There are 165 high schools of which 87 are boy’s schools and 78 are girl’s schools.

The district has 59 higher secondary schools of which 35 are for boys and 24 are for girls’. There are eight madrassas or mosque schools.

Around 409,104 students are enrolled in these schools with 60 per cent of all students boys and 40 per cent are girls. As many as 12,213 teachers are available in the district to teach these students.

 



According to data from the K-P Independent Monitoring Unit (a unit set up by the government), as many as 168 (9.57 per cent) schools of the 1,755 schools in Mardan are still without power. A further 82 schools (f4.67 per cent) have no clean dirking water for either children or teachers.

Similarly, 30 schools (1.71 per cent) in the former provincial education minister’s native district, lack toilets for both students and teachers.

Similarly, 13 schools (0.74 per cent) in the district are still without boundary walls.

The K-P Annual Statistical Report of Government Schools 2017-18 shows that at the primary level, as many as 433 rooms in government schools of Mardan require major repairs while 726 rooms in different schools need to be completely rebuilt.

Similarly, at the middle school level, 23 schools require major reconstruction while 28 schools are in poor condition and require to be completely rebuilt.

At high and higher level, over 600 schools require major or complete reconstructions as these school buildings are in dilapidated condition.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2018.