BECS ghost schools: Two months on, provincial authorities offer no explanation

No action taken against 2,000 such schools over a year after they were reported.


Peer Muhammad September 23, 2012

ISLAMABAD: Notices on ghost schools issued to provincial heads of the Basic Education Community Schools (BECS) seem to have gone unnoticed.

The National Education Foundation (NEF) management issued notices two months ago to BECS provincial directors about the more than 2,000 ghost schools operating across the country. No one replied, according to official sources.

The ghost schools were detected in a survey conducted by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) in 2011. NADRA teams found that these schools existed only on paper. A year passed before the NEF took any action on the findings, mainly due to political and bureaucratic pressure, according to official sources.

To top it off, Ghulam Mohiuddin Marri, a member of the NEF board of directors and also member infrastructure at the Planning Commission, claimed that as many as half of the 15,000 schools in the four provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan are “essentially ghost schools”.

A senior Ministry of Education and Technical Training official said they are under tremendous pressure to not do anything, as there are “powerful people involved” in the project.

The official added that
the show-cause notices are also just a formality to show to the media, as some senior officials are “least interested” in investigating or fixing responsibility for the debacle.

BECS Coordination Director Saadia Ghuman, however, said they have received responses from the provincial directors and the cases are with the minister.

“We will definitely take action if we find anyone responsible for corruption and mismanagement,” she said. She had no answer for why the process was taking so long, however.

“Rampant corruption by officials in the head office [in Islamabad] and in the provincial offices, with the blessings of some powerful politicians including some former ministers, is to blame for the project’s failure,” said an NEF official.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2012.

 

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