Sindh’s next budget should focus more on education, industrialisation: Zubair

Karachi: Sindh Governor Mohammad Zubair has advised the provincial government to accord the utmost importance to education and industrialisation in the budget for the upcoming financial year.

“Promotion of education and industrialisation is the key to progress and development of Sindh,” said Zubair as chief guest of the Governor House’s annual fundraising dinner for the Green Crescent Trust (GCT) to support its network of over 800 charity projects all over the province.

The governor’s advice was directed towards Sindh Planning & Development Minister Saeed Ghani, who was one of the prominent dinner guests. “The government has its limitations when it comes to accelerating the pace of development, but what it can do is facilitate this process by promoting industrialisation.”

Zubair said that wherever the private sector was encouraged to engage in industrialisation, it helped a lot in creating a burgeoning middle class, who actively participated in the process of development.

He said that other cities in the upcountry, such as Gujranwala, Faisalabad and Sialkot, have been developed because the government fully facilitated the process of industrialisation there.

The governor cited the example of Thar, saying that the government facilitated the process of development there through industrialisation and now the best companies of the country are working there to extract coal to establish power plants to produce energy.

“It is because of the private and non-governmental sector working there that the face of Thar is changing with the establishment new educational, health care and skill development facilities.” He praised the extensive network of schools and water supply projects of the GCT in the remote areas of the province, such as Thar, where otherwise people do not have access to the basic necessities of life.

Zubair was pleased to note that the problem of water availability in Thar will be overcome owing to the extensive efforts of NGOs such as the GCT. The trust’s CEO Zahid Saeed said the GCT has been operating since 1995 and has so far established 153 schools with an enrolment of 29,000 students in the most challenging locations of the province where there was no educational facility before.

Saeed said the GCT has to meet the recurring expense of Rs30 million every year to run its network of charitable schools. He said plans are afoot for setting up water supply schemes in all 2,300 villages of Thar by 2020 and for increasing the student enrolment to 100,000.

Prominent industrialist Sardar Muhammad Yasin Malik said the government should focus on the projects being initiated in Thar for using underground saline water for cultivation of the otherwise barren land there.

The highlight of the night was a special tableau by students of a GCT school in Mithi who presented a performance based on folk music of the area to depict the process of development and progress in Thar with the promotion of education and similar other projects.