‘Govt not serious about tackling ghost schools’

With less than three percent of the GDP being spent on education and no effective strategy in sight to tackle alarming issues, including thousands of ghost schools and over 22 million out-of-school children in the country, it is the non-governmental sector that has to discharge social obligations in place of the government.

This was the consensus opinion at a programme held here the other day. The event was aimed at introducing prospective donors’ work of a charitable trust in education and other social sectors in Sindh, where the government has miserably failed to deliver to under-privileged masses.

The audience of the programme were informed that Green Crescent Trust (GCT) as part of its charitable and volunteer work in the province had in the last 21 years established 165 schools with enrolment of 33,000 students in most risky, least developed and remote parts of Sindh. The trust has also established wells in 430 villages of Thar with a number of beneficiaries reaching 120,000 with the aim of providing clean water to  all 2,300 villages of Tharparkar.

Former Trade Development Authority chief executive S M Muneer said that despite numerous socio-economic problems, Pakistan was placed among top three countries whose people gave maximum monetary donations for charitable causes.

He said Sindh alone had 5,000 ghost schools while the government had never been serious about checking the constant payments of salaries to absentee teachers of such government-run schools.

He said the government seemed to be least committed to the cause of improving the future of the children as there had been quite insufficient budgetary spending on education.

Muneer said a similar was the sorry state of affairs in the health sector, where no government hospital had set up any separate ward to treat children suffering from thalassaemia. He said that in such a situation the non-governmental sector had to come forward to provide basic health and education facilities to under-privileged masses.

The former TDAP chief announced a one-million-rupee donation for the GCT, which, according to his recommendation, be preferably used for digging 10 wells for providing water facility to the people of Thar.

The president of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce & Industry, Zubair Tufail, announced a Rs500,000 donation for the GCT for its programmes to establish schools and run water supply projects in remote parts of the province.

The FPCCI president said that those associated with charitable organizations like the GCT had been selflessly working for the humanitarian causes.

He said that teachings of Islam had always stood for lessening the suffering of people with less privileges and opportunities to excel in their lives.

Sardar Yasin Malik, patron-in-chief of GCT, said that several organizations had been working in Karachi, which had been genuinely working for the charitable causes.

He said that such organizations did need monetary support of people as prospective donors should actively come forward to donate such charities without hesitating about the amount they could afford to give for humanitarian causes.

Former senator Abdul Haseeb Khan said the government could not increase its spending on health and education sectors to more than two percent of the GDP and public service delivery in the two sectors had remained very poor.