Incompetent and corrupt individuals serving in the education department are the key cause of this crisis.
UMERKOT: The Tharparkar desert in Sindh is the largest such region of Pakistan and is the 18th largest in the world with an area of 22,000 square kilometres. The population of Tharparkar is 1.5 million, distributed in 2,300 villages and the district’s literacy rate is 18.36 per cent. Vocational education is introduced in some schools while an artisan’s centre has been set up at District Headquarters Mithi.
But all these efforts are in the wake of a number of ghost schools. Even though thousands of children ‘attend school’, they are unable to name a single alphabet. These children study in the absence of buildings, furniture, books, washrooms or a source of clean drinking water. A total of 5,229 government schools are non-operational in the province and Tharparkar, where 798 of them are located, tops the list of districts with the largest number of closed schools. Incompetent and corrupt individuals serving in the education department are the key cause of this crisis.
Ali Nawaz Rahimoo
Published in The Express Tribune, August 7th, 2014.
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