The government will need to construct around 19,000 schools in Punjab by 2040 to cater to cater to a speedy increase in the population, a fact sheet released on the World Population Day reveled.
The population of the province is increasing at an annual rate of 2.5 per cent and is set to exceed 230 million by 2050.
According to the fact sheet of a non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Population Council, the government's failure to build 19,000 new public schools by 2040 would leave millions of students out of school.
July 11 was celebrated as the World Population Day and events to mark the occasion were organised across the country.
The fact sheet discussed the steps needed to cope with the high birth rate in Punjab.
There are around 47,500 government schools across Punjab but they are already facing various problems, including lack of facilities.
However, the Punjab government is planning to privatise around 15,000 of the schools. Then move has sparked demands to stop the implementation of the privatisation policy and claims that it would close the door of schools for thousands of poor families.
A report cited by the Punjab Teachers Union (PTU) estimates that more than 12 million children in the province are out of school.
A leader of the union said the teachers efforts had resulted in the government schools performing better as compared to the private institutions.
In the matriculation results announced earlier this week, the top positions were secured by students of government schools in six of the nine Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) across the province.
The Population Council also declared that 57,000 new schools would have to be built across the country by the year 2040. In addition , Punjab government needs to create 50 million jobs by 2050 in view of the expected population increase.
According to the report, the current population of Punjab is 122.888 million. The Population Council estimates that the population of the province can increase to 235 million by 2050 and thousands of schools need to be opened in the coming years.
Punjab Teachers Union (PTU) Secretary General Rana Liaqat Ali supported the call for the construction of new schools in the province.
'At every platform, we have been stressing that the privatisation of the schools in the province is the worst decision and the government should not take decisions that would deprive children of poor families of education,' he said.
He said the government schools were only option for most of the poor families lacking financial resources to educate their children in the province.
The teachers' leader said it was lamentable that the government was privatising its schools at a time when the ground realities demanded the setting up of a large number of more educational institutions.
'In the recent annual matric result, we proved that we are performing better as compared to private schools, although there is a shortage of more than 100,000 teachers in the government schools of the province,' he added.
He said the government should focus on recruiting teachers and constructing more schools to ensure the education of the estimated 12 million out-of-school children in the province.
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