While the education system of Pakistan is producing unemployable youth in abundance, there is definitely a dearth of skilled workers in the country. Highlighting the issue, Javed Iqbal Chaudhry, Acting President of FPCCI, has emphasized that there is a need to launch a 'National Technical Education Programme' to produce skilled manpower to help meet the requirements of local industries as well as cater to the growing need of the Arab countries. He is of the view that one way of attracting foreign investment is to ensure availability of skilled workers in the vicinity of the industrial zones and that could be achieved by introducing technical institutes equipped with modern facilities and a team of professionals to take care of the students. "However, human capital is the key element in promoting the service sector and with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) coming up as a potential economic growth field there is a need to exploit its potential for putting Pakistan's economy on a high-growth trajectory," according to him. By coming up with right policies to tap the international market worth dollar 4 trillion, the country's economy could be turned around on top of creating millions of jobs as envisioned by the Prime Minister in his election manifesto. With the opportunities coming up on the back of CPEC, the demand for skilled labour and IT professionals would increase manifold and to fill this requirement, the country needs a chain of vocational training centres.
We feel that what Chaudhry has stressed makes a lot of sense and is very much appropriate to the situation. Since the inception of the country, the authorities have generally emphasized the importance of general education and largely ignored vocational training which could produce highly skilled workers. Parents could also be equally blamed because they want white-collar office jobs with some authority for their children and do not like them to be trained as skilled workers and dirty their hands. Such an attitude could be favoured in an agrarian society but cannot be preferred in the modern age when the skilled workers are the backbone of industry and ICT and greatly in demand. It may, however, be pointed out that, of late, the government has realized the importance of vocational training and tried to broaden the scope of technical education but much more needs to be done to meet the requirements, both within and outside the country. According to the latest data, while a total of 31.6 thousand high schools with 560.6 thousand teachers were functional in the country, a total of only 3.8 thousand technical and vocational institutes with 18.2 thousand teachers were operating in 2016-17. One of the reasons for low level of education in both general and vocational schools is that public expenditure on education is as low as 2.2 percent of GDP. Another reason for slow growth of vocational education is the lacklustre attitude of the private sector towards this form of education. While the private sector has made great inroads in general education all over the country, no such enthusiasm exists for opening the schools for vocational and training education though the establishment of such schools can play a crucial role in modernising and speeding up of production process in the country. The government has, of late, established National Vocational and Teaching Training Commission to address the challenges facing the Technical and Vocational Education in the country and initiated the PM's Youth Skill Development Programme, benefiting 100,000 youth from lower middle class and the deprived segments of society. However, given the overall demand in the country and abroad and the opportunities coming up with CPEC, efforts made by the government and the private sector are much less than desired. Such an effort is all the more necessary due to the promise of the PM to provide employment to 10 million people over the next five years. This promise cannot be fulfilled if our educational institutions continue to churn out unskilled and unemployable youth on a large-scale.
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