Census on Education has unfolded shocking revelation diminishing the hopes of achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) following detection of a large number of educational institution in the Federal Capital without basic facilities.
The census was conducted by the Ministry of Education with the support of UNSECO and Statistics Department and released last week discovered 51 schools without boundary walls, 32 not having drinking water facility, 20 without electricity, and 39 without toilets in the capital territory.
The situation is worse in other parts of the country as thousands of schools reported in the census were taking classes in open. Around 9,776 schools have sky as the roof of which 4001 are in Sindh province only.
It means that the students of these schools have to stay away from their open-air schools in the monsoon winter seasons. Is this a conducive environment for achieving MDGs, which sets out targets of acquiring maximum literacy rate, is a point to ponder.
The census mocks the government tall claims of doing enough to improve the literacy rate when it points out that 53,481 government educational institutions have no boundary walls while 46,766 have no water. Similarly, around 81,633 are without electricity and 57,216 without toilets.
The data in the census does not portray a satisfactory picture of media hyped 'literate Punjab'. Billions of rupees are being spent on 'literate Punjab' campaign but sadly, the provincial government never thought of providing boundary walls to 18,339 schools, drinking facility to 13,690 schools, electricity to 32,189 schools, toilets to 22,206 and buildings to 3,433 schools.
Sindh province is not far behind as it also has 14,838 government educational institutions without boundary walls, 11,586 without drinking water facility, 22,149 without electricity, 12,842 without toilets and 4,001 without proper buildings.
There are 9,014 schools in NWFP without boundary walls, 9,774 without drinking water facility, 13,716 without electricity, and 1,214 without proper buildings while in Balochistan 5,447 schools have no boundary walls, 5,621 have no drinking water , 6,950 have no power facility, 6,137 lacks toilets and 585 have no building.
Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) has 1,275 schools without boundary walls, 2,013 without drinking water facility, 2,045 without electricity, 2,079 without toilet facility and 292 without proper building.
In the Northern Areas, 748 schools lack a boundary wall, 1,085 do not have drinking water facility, 1,033 are without electricity, 738 without toilets and 36 without a building.
In AJK 3,769 educational institutions are without boundary walls, 2,965 without drinking water, 3,531 without electricity, 2,783 have no toilets, and 215 without a building. In Punjab, there are 66,770 institutions in the public sector and 48,541 in the private sector. In Sindh 46,738 schools are in public sector and 12,574 in private sector with a ratio of 79 percent and 21 percent, respectively. NWFP has 29,430 public sector and 11,276 private sector institutions.
Balochistan has 9,742 public and 1,750 private sector educational institutions. In the ICT, there are 598 government and 750 private educational institutions.
Interestingly there are more private educational institutions in ICT. Forty-four percent of the total ICT educational institutions are in public sector and 56 percent in the private sector.
In the FATA, there are a total of 4,704 institutions in the public sector and 640 in the private sector. In the AJK 5,092 institutions are in the public sector and 2,711 in private sector. In the Northern Areas 5,092 institutions are in the public and 2,711 in the private sector.