Education woes: Balochistan dominates ministerial meeting

ISLAMABAD: The Inter-provincial education ministers’ (IPEM) meeting on Tuesday turned out to be a forum for Balochistan to give vent to the issues they are facing. “About 5,000 schools are shelterless and single-teacher schools,” said Balochistan Education Minister Jan Mohammad Buledi. “Not a single PhD or a competent officer is available to review the textbooks or carry out monitoring and evaluation hence we are compelled to teach Punjab [text] books.” The meeting was attended by provincial education ministers as well as secretaries, besides Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal and State Minister for Education Balighur Rehman. Sindh Additional Secretary Jamal Din said that the rural and urban disparity in literacy rate persisted in the province which was 41 per cent, 78 per cent respectively.

He stated that out of a total of 47,000 schools, over 10,000 were shelterless. “Over 27,000 schools were without electricity, 21,600 have no toilets and in total 2.37 million children were out of school.” Din termed high drop-out rate, low capacity of teachers and trust deficit between donors and government as the prime problems the province was facing. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Elementary Education Minister Muhammad Atif said they were also doing legislation for implementation of Article 25-A and ‘Education For All’ (EFA) and increased the development budget from Rs9 to Rs23 billion for the fiscal year. AJK Minister for Education Mian Abdul Waheed said they had not received any share in National Finance Commission Award still they were trying to address the issues. The members agreed to meet quarterly and constitute a committee to review National Education Policy 2009 and formulate terms of reference for formation of National Curriculum Commission (NCC). Besides, they agreed that the secretariat of IPEM be transferred from PC to the education ministry. Ahsan Iqbal said though the curriculum development was a provincial subject, there must be minimum standards in place for national integration and the establishment of NCC was for the same purpose. The commission would be completely independent and its chair would be rotated among all the provinces so that it is not monopolized by the federal government, said Balighur Rehman. Published in The Express Tribune, February 12th, 2014.