کچھ پڑھا لکھا پنجاب کے بارے میں About Literate Punjab

Read "Picture of Neglect" Ediditorial in Dawn of May 02, 2005.
Picture of neglectYESTERDAY’S issue of this newspaper carried a forlorn picture of a primary school in a Sialkot village. The caption said the school lacked basic facilities such as electricity and water. This is a picture replicated in every village and small town throughout the country. Even in the bigger cities, we have seen and heard of the neglected state of government schools. This neglect of infrastructural provisions is in addition to the deplorable standards of teaching. Reports continue to come in of lack of trained teachers or of missing teachers. In Punjab at one time, there was a great deal of uproar over “ghost” schools, schools that existed only on paper or whose buildings had been requisitioned by landlords for their own purposes. Such “ghost” schools or ghostly schools, with no teachers or teaching, continue to exist — of this there can be little doubt. The situation is particularly grim in areas that once used to be called the mofussil.Since everything — the government, the media, NGOs — is based in the bigger urban centres, no one gets to hear much of what is happening in the rural hinterland, and few care. The new, actually now almost four years old, local government system has been unable, apart from its many other failures, to mobilize a community effort in the rural affairs that could make up for official apathy in the fields of education, health and social welfare. Unless a most determined effort is made to reverse the trend of planning for development from the top, there can be little hope of an improvement in villages, tehsils and district towns. NGOs could have supplemented government efforts in this respect, but the government establishment has made up its mind that it will not work with the NGOs because they are liberal, they champion human and civil rights and speak up for democracy. It is time somebody thought seriously about all this. For a start, coming back to our picture from Sialkot, perhaps we should set up a lower education commission.