Karachi (HRNW)- Sindh Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah has termed the statements made by Miftah Ismail in a press conference on social media as baseless. The Sindh government has already expressed its reservations over the report that Miftah Ismail has referred to. The Sindh government had termed the District Education Program Index report of the Planning and Commission of Pakistan as contrary to the facts.
We have said that the institutions of Islamabad play the role of “desk analysts” without knowing the ground realities. The data sources of the report that is being referred to are from 2022-23, while everyone knows that there was severe flooding in 2022 and people were homeless by early 2023, so the facts in the reporting have changed-
A deliberate attempt is being made to degrade Sindh without knowing the facts. Miftah Ismail has no other excuse to sell, so he came up with a half-baked report. On the one hand, the report states that enrollment in primary, middle, high and higher secondary has increased by 3.2, 7.6, 5 and 8.8 percent respectively, while on the other hand, the same report also shows a decline in literacy rate, which is a contradiction in itself.
After the constitutional amendment, education is a provincial matter, provincial departments are not even contacted before any survey. The tragedy is that federal institutions have not been able to count us accurately till date, so how true can their other figures be? They have issued a one-sided report that schools in Sindh are in a dilapidated condition, we ourselves are already saying that 20,000 schools have been affected due to heavy rains and floods in Sindh.
Our educational infrastructure has been affected due to natural disasters, it is baseless to include the issue of infrastructure being affected by floods as performance. The Planning Commission people do not know, Sindh is the only province in Pakistan whose curriculum is said in an impartial analysis by UNESCO that Sindh’s curriculum is better than the rest of the provinces. Miftah Ismail, tell the rest of the provinces that there is a shortage of one hundred thousand teachers in Punjab schools, what is the condition of girls in KPK schools?
The process of recruiting 90,000 teachers on merit in Sindh was completed with complete transparency, after the recruitment of teachers in Sindh, the quality has improved and the admission ratio has also increased. Taking the lead in Sindh, the teachers’ license policy was introduced, these steps were initiated by the Sindh government.
In Sindh, there are deserts, mountains, coastal areas and mountains on an area of one hundred thousand square kilometers where there is a problem of network, obviously the education department cannot do the work of providing network, we were kept behind in technology on this basis. Similarly, the electricity problem in Sindh is in front of everyone, villages are living without electricity, schools are also part of the villages.
We have never hidden the legitimate flaws of our system. The Planning Commission’s own report says that Naushahro Feroze district of Sindh has scored 69 in terms of performance, leaving behind more than half of the districts of Punjab and all the districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The only Naushahro Feroze district is ahead of 70 percent of the districts of Punjab in terms of learning outcomes, was there any reference to this?
Why didn’t Miftah Ismail say this, whether or not Miftah Ismail is probably still playing his old friend. Miftah Ismail has been the finance minister, doesn’t she know that 92 percent of the budget allocated to the education department is spent on salaries. We have never hidden our shortcomings, but federal agencies do not even bother to ask us before preparing a report. When the data is not based on facts, accurate and lasting solutions to problems cannot be found.
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