
It was revealed that there are 5,000 schools that do not even have a building and operate in the open air mostly with just a single teacher. There is not a single properly qualified person available to review textbooks and curriculum content. This means that the education department is forced to teach Punjab textbooks in the province’s schools. There are thousands of schools without electricity or toilets. Literacy figures in rural Balochistan leave a lot to be desired. A familiar litany of reasons for the deficit was aired: lack of capacity on the part of teachers, the ‘trust deficit’ between donors and the government and the failure to receive a share of the National Finance Commission Award. The IPEC meeting decided to take evasive action by agreeing to meet on a quarterly basis and set up yet another committee to review the 2009 National Education Policy. Neither action is likely to bring any relief to the uneducated of Balochistan. What might help is for there to be an education emergency declared in the province and solid political heft alongside physical and fiscal resources deployed to address the problem.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 17th, 2014.
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