Cheating in Balochistan: Testing times

How one school in Balochistan got its students to stop cheating

The examination hall in Turbat’s Delta School looks like a standard room in any educational institute in Balochistan. The room has unpainted walls and a wooden roof and young boys and girls sit in neat rows as they scribble on answer sheets. But there’s something unprecedented going on in this room: there is no cheating.



Delta School is the first institute in Balochistan to install CCTVs inside its examination halls in a bid to monitor student activity, clamp down on rampant cheating practices and increase security in the wake of a string of attacks on schools within and outside the province. In February this year, Balochistan Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch led a rally in Quetta to highlight the growing trend of cheating in the province’s schools just weeks before matriculation examinations were scheduled to be held. The chief minister was joined by legislators, politicians, teachers and students, some of whom carried placards reading, “Cheating will be the death of knowledge.”

While officials promised that ‘secret’ cameras would be installed in all school examination halls, Balochistan Education Department Secretary Abdul Saboor Kakar said the provincial government did not have enough time to install these cameras before the matriculation exams. But Murad Ismail, the 35-year-old educationist behind Delta School, chose not to wait for the government to kick off the process of installation, and instead covered the Rs25,000 installation cost for four cameras in the school through the pupils’ fees.

Balochistan Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch led a rally in Quetta last month to highlight the growing trend of cheating in the province’s schools.

There are 2,700 students enrolled in Delta School, located on Turbat Road near Dakhana Chowk. People living in the area are dependent on livestock and agriculture as well as an informal cross-border trade with Iran. Ismail set up the private English-medium school here in 2006 after he returned from his higher education studies in Karachi. “Many of the school buildings in this district are poorly constructed and lack basic facilities,” says Ismail. “But our students do not lag behind — they compete at the national level.” Delta School’s first batch of grade 10 students includes Mahnoor Mirwani, who received the highest marks in matriculation exams in the Makran division, which includes the districts of Panjgur, Turbat and Gwadar. “We expect high standards from our students and to compete at the provincial level and they make us proud,” he adds.

The students of Delta School stand out in a province that has the lowest literacy rate in the country (33% as compared to the national literacy rate of 53%). Currently, there are 2.3 million children out of schools in Balochistan and for those enrolled in educational institutes, there is one teacher for every 16 students on average. In remote areas of Turbat and Gwadar districts, there is one teacher for each primary school comprising four to five classes. One school in Turbat was closed for several months recently as there was no teacher to cater to the students. In many schools in the area, teachers continue to draw salaries despite not attending classes.

“The education system here needs way more improvement than people can imagine,” says 16-year-old high achiever Mirwani. She points out that Delta School’s crackdown on cheating is part of a larger attempt to improve conditions in the province and the country. “How can a student who cheats in school be a good citizen or serve his country well?” she asks. “The corruption we suffer nationally starts in our classrooms.”

Principal Murad Ismail watches a CCTV feed of Delta School’s examination halls. Photos courtesy Delta School Turbat 

Sangat Rafiq, a lecturer at Balochistan University, says that while the provincial government has launched a massive publicity campaign against cheating, it has not shown commitment to resolving the problem. “The government has installed large billboards and put up banners with messages against cheating but this is an absolute waste of money,” he says. “If a private school like Delta could invest in a surveillance system, then why is it so difficult for the government to do so in schools in the province?”

Rafiq points out that while access to education remains a problem in Balochistan, rampant cheating results in abysmal standards of education. “Many students in the 10^th grade or in Masters programmes are unable to fill out applications in Urdu or English,” he says. Mirwani adds that students are caught unaware once they enter college classrooms to see that every subject is taught in English. “From the first to the 10^th grade, these students have studied everything in Urdu,” she says.

In stark contrast, Delta School students are awarded scholarships to study in other parts of Balochistan and internationally through an exchange programme with American schools. Classes here are taught in English and one of the school’s three campuses in Turbat is devoted towards learning to speak and write in English. Each student is charged between Rs800 to Rs900 monthly and the school employs 140 teachers. Ismail is able to watch over these teachers and the school’s 2,700 students via an application that streams footage from the CCTV cameras directly to his cellphone or online to his computer. While the school suffers with the rest of the district during loadshedding hours — the power often goes out for half the school day — the cameras continue to function via a backup generator.

Education Secretary Saboor Kakar says it will cost the government roughly four million rupees to install a similar surveillance system in colleges and universities across the province. “All schools will be properly monitored and people will see results from the government’s measures within the next few years,” he promises. However, parents and teachers are not as optimistic. They say, the proof of better education and security in schools in Balochistan can be found by answering one simple question: how many political leaders and officials send their children to study in schools in Balochistan? “Until the children of these government officials do not study in state-run schools in the province, people will never agree with the government’s claims that education here is improving,” says senior Balochistan National Party leader Khurshid Jamaldini.

Shezad Baloch is a reporter for The Express Tribune.

He tweets @Shezadbaloch.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, March 8^th,  2015.