Out of school: Disowned by the govt, Atharki’s children have nowhere to go

Although the village has a school, lack of teachers leaves children without education

KARACHI:

In Thatta’s Atharki village, Safooran is the only woman whose sons go to school.

The two boys, with the elder one in intermediate and the younger in eighth grade, study in nearby Mirpur Sakro and Gharo, coming home to meet their mother on weekends. Given the distance they have to cover, Safooran says that her children cannot make it to school and back home every day.



Atharki, which lies in Thatta district, does have a school - the Syed Aijaz Shah Shirazi Government Primary School, named after a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz MPA. But for all the good it does to the villagers - over a thousand fishermen families - it might as well not be there.

When the school was established in 2004, the government appointed two teachers for students up to the fifth grade, serving both Atharki and the adjacent Haji Ishaq Solangi village, where the villagers depend largely on tomato and sunflower crops for their livelihood. With its concrete floor and solid boundary walls, it stands out in the village where the houses are wooden huts with thatched roofs. Indeed, it is one of 734 government schools out of a total of 1,538 in Thatta with proper boundary walls, according to Alif Ailaan’s District Education Rankings 2014.

For the last five years, however, there have been no instructors save for Jalal Shah, who has been teaching the Holy Quran to the village boys for two years.

Ghulam Muhammad once taught Sindhi at the school along with another teacher. According to him, NGOs such as National Commission of Human Development came to the rescue but they only had funds to work there for a few months.

“Shah, the instructor, earns Rs6,000 per month, pitched in by the community but the same people wouldn’t pay schoolteachers because they think it’s the government’s responsibility,” he said. “We can’t teach for free; we need regular salaries.”

The government, meanwhile, seems to have disowned the school. “There is no school in Thatta by this name in our records,” Thatta EDO Ghulam Qader Kaka told The Express Tribune. “It has clearly been created out of someone’s imagination.” He admitted that all of Thatta’s schools were in bad shape.



According to the Supreme Court’s recent findings on non-functional schools, there are more than 897 ghost schools in the district. Given this, only 31 per cent of Thatta’s children are enrolled in primary schools - even though they are keen to learn.

Having no better alternative, the girls of the village, proficient in traditional Sindhi embroidery, are often married off by the time they are 13 years old. “We have a school but there is no one to teach our children,” said a villager with four daughters. “What else are we to do?”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2015.