Teaching ghosts

Ghost schools are not merely failing to deliver on education, they are a drain on provincial education budgets.


Editorial November 30, 2013
In addition there are 5,827 non-functional schools and 1,008 of the ‘ghost’ schools are said to be under illegal occupation. PHOTO: BASEER QALANDAR/EXPRESS/FILE

The revelation that there are 2,088 ‘ghost’ schools in the country is hardly new news; the ‘ghost schools’ have been around for 50 years, and were enumerated in a World Bank report that has records that date from the mid-1990s as far as Punjab was concerned. In addition there are 5,827 non-functional schools and 1,008 of the ‘ghost’ schools are said to be under illegal occupation but presumably not by ghosts. The figures are derived from a report commissioned on the orders of the Supreme Court (SC), and it is the situation in Sindh that is by far the most worrying with 1,192 ghost schools and 419 of them under illegal occupation.

Ghost schools are not merely failing to deliver anything by way of education, they are a drain on provincial education budgets as most of them have ‘ghost’ staff that are paid every month in very real money. The report commissioned by the SC does not mention what the loss is to provincial exchequers but it will be a significant sum given the numbers of ghost schools that there are. The numbers also reveal a deeper malaise. The ghost schools problem has been around for decades yet it persists, and seemingly at a level that has altered little over the years, suggesting that successive governments have done little or nothing to banish the ghosts. Reports of prosecutions for running ghost schools or fraudulently claiming teachers’ salaries or monies to equip these non-existent places are as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. Police and corrupt education department officers ignore and exploit the situation respectively. The report makes a range of recommendations which pass the buck to the provincial education departments — which are the root cause of much of the problem in the first place. With budgets for education now devolved to the provinces under the Eigthteenth Amendment and provincial bureaucracies being ill-prepared to increase their capacity to manage the new monies, ghost schools are going to be around for many years to come — good news for ghosts if nobody else.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1st, 2013.

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COMMENTS (1)

x | 10 years ago | Reply

PML-N wake up! Laptops distribution does for education what a band aid does for severed jugular vein.

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