Education in Pakistan ‘in a shambles’

Foreign Correspondent, Islamabad:  Wilkinson

The article was published in The Nation, an English Newspaper in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Young students gather to pray and sing the national anthem in the assembly at the TCF Primary School in Karachi. Photo by Asim Hafeez / The National

There are tens of thousands of schools across Pakistan where there are no students, no teachers and in many cases, no buildings, yet thousands of dollars are spent each year on their “upkeep”.

The ghost schools, as they are more commonly known, have become an emblematic symptom of Pakistan’s failing education system, suffering from a lack of commitment by successive governments.

The lack of determination to tackle Pakistan’s vast education deficit comes as pro-Taliban militants are taking their fight to the schools of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), where they have bombed girls schools, and are using them as fertile grounds for recruitment.

A five-year plan by Gen Pervez Musharraf, the former military officer and president, to reform the curricula of Pakistan’s madrassas, or religious seminaries, and bring them under state control, ended “in shambles”, according to a report by the International Crisis Group, a research and policy think tank.

But many are of the view that although the madrassas, which offer free education, pose a threat to Pakistan, it is the rundown state of secular education that is the real danger.

“Madrassas are a problem but a much smaller problem than mainstream education because of the sheer numbers involved,” said Prof Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist from Quaid i Azam University in Islamabad.

The education system, left to atrophy for 30 years, is crippled by every possible ill: crumbling classrooms, poor teaching materials, untrained and truant teachers and endemic corruption.

Pakistan has more than 150,000 public education institutions serving more than 21 million students and a huge private sector that serves another 12 million.

Yet, according to a Unesco report, the government only spends 2.4 per cent of its GDP on education against the Unesco-recommended norm of a minimum of four per cent. Some 3,500 schools do not have a building; of those that do, 4,000 are classed as “dangerous”; 29,000 schools have no electricity; 14,000 have no drinking water; 22,000 do not have a toilet; 4,000 consist of a single classroom; and fewer than 100 secondary schools have science labs.

Officially, 53 per cent of Pakistanis are literate. Others say the figure is nearer 30 per cent. Literacy, often defined as no more than the ability to write one’s name, is as low as three per cent among women in some rural areas.

The exact figure of ghost schools is unknown but Gen Musharraf estimated there were 30,000 in 2006.

“There is an allocation of money for which can be found no evidence of buildings, teachers or schools,” said Abdul Hameed Nayyar, a respected academic and educationalist..

“It shows the order of corruption in the country and particularly in the educational bureaucracy,” he said.

Pakistan is among the top 12 recipients of funding for educational aid but little of it trickles down to teachers and pupils.

A Unesco report last year found that Pakistan has the lowest Gender Parity Index in the region, that is, there are more boys than girls in schools compared with any other country, including Afghanistan. Only 22 per cent of girls, compared to 47 per cent boys, complete primary schooling.

But some seeds of hope have been sewed, mostly by non-governmental groups who are setting up primary schools such as one in Machar, or mosquito, colony, one of Karachi’s 500 slum communities. The slum is built on a vast rubbish tip that now constitutes “reclaimed land” in the port city. The school, built and run by the Pakistani educational charity, The Citizens Foundation (TCF), is an oasis of cleanliness and efficiency amid the neighborhood’s squalor.

During a recent visit to the school, rows of neat khaki-uniformed school children scribbled furiously at their desks.

Many of Machar’s 180 schoolchildren have been raised in abject poverty, in families where child labour and malnourishment are the norm.

Set up in 1995 by six businessmen, TCF runs 530 school units in 63 areas in Pakistan, all of which are in slum or rural areas. It teaches 65,000 children, has trained and employs 3,500 teachers and raises its 530 million rupee (Dh24.7m) annual operational cost through corporate and private donations.

Its director, Ahsan Saleem, said that he and his five fellow founding members were “nauseated” by the large number of children begging in the street.

They set up the foundation after a dinner party conversation about the lamentable state of Pakistan.

The foundation’s mantra is “to do education on a war footing”. Its target is to build 1,000 schools by 2010 that would educate 350,000-400,000 pupils.

The founding members continue to foot the bill for 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the expense of building a school, which on average costs seven million rupees each.
Expatriate Pakistanis in the UAE pay for the annual running costs of about 40 TCF schools.

But there is a constant battle to provide the basics. “Many of our children at Machar are involved in peeling shrimps or do some odd job to help supplement the family’s income. They get up at 5am to work,” said Tasnim Jaffer, a senior volunteer working with TCF.

“There is no homework as most of our children are working children,” she added.
The children, aged from four to early teens, earn 10 rupees for cleaning a basket of 200-300 shrimps and can make up to 50 rupees per day.

TCF schoolchildren pay between 10 rupees to 175 rupees each month for primary education and between 20 rupees and 250 rupees for secondary education, depending on their family’s income.

In some exceptional cases, such as for orphans, they pay no fee. But the foundation charges a token amount to foster commitment among pupils. Even young shrimp peelers pay for their own schooling.

The fees pay for teaching, uniforms, books and a weekly dietary supplement of biscuits and milk.

The TCF education starts with a solid grounding in all the core subjects but also makes sure that personal hygiene is ingrained in a child.

“Our emphasis is not on rote learning but on an entire upbringing. You cannot imagine the pressure put on us from parents to take their children.

“What we are doing is opening their minds to a better standard of living,” Mrs. Jaffer said..

TCF students, who have the benefit of fully equipped science laboratories, have won scholarships to further education and several are now studying engineering and medicine at university.

Two more schools blown up in Swat

News Report

MINGORA: As security forces intensified the operation in Swat, the Maulana Fazlullah-led militants on Tuesday blew up two more boysí schools in Kabal, taking the number of destroyed schools to 188.

Also, a man was killed in a clash between the forces and militants in Balogram, while 24 shops and four vehicles were destroyed in Matta during shelling. A primary school was destroyed with explosives in Koza Bandai village of Kabal. Another school was reduced to rubble in Dherai. Official sources put the number of the torched or destroyed schools at 188, most of them girlsí schools.

Speeding up their offensive, the forces took control of Salanday town of Manglawar and kept advancing in the area. The forces have launched offensive from three sides — Ningolai, Khwazakhela and Shakardara. Also, the troops completely secured Sangota, an important town on the outskirts of Mingora, and launched a search operation there.

A man was killed when caught in firing between security forces and militants in Balogram. He was identified as Fazl Mabood. Meanwhile, the Swat Media Centre notified imposition of curfew in Mingora from Tuesday night.

Besides, a convoy of the forces was attacked with an improvised explosive device (IED) at Sambat in Matta, a stronghold of the militants. The blast wounded two personnel besides damaging a vehicle. However, a spokesman for the SMC, Maj Nasir Ali, claimed that the forces did not suffer any loss in the blast. Following the attack, a search operation was launched in the vicinity.

The militants attacked another convoy of the forces with AK-47 in Kanju. Both the sides exchanged fire for some time, but there was no word on casualties. In Matta, 24 shops and four vehicles were destroyed when a mortar shell hit a market on the New Road. One person, identified as Wali Muhammad, also sustained injuries in shelling.

Credits: The News

US will act on ‘actionable targets’ in FATA: Biden

* Vice president says US working to build Pakistan’s capability to counter insurgency
* FATA had been ‘ungovernable’ for Pakistan

WASHINGTON: Hinting that the United States drone attacks in the Tribal Areas would continue as before, US Vice President Joe Biden said the US would act if there was an ‘actionable target’ in sight.

He said the US was working towards strengthening Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capability, but declined to specifically address the issue of drone strikes against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda targets on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border.

“I cannot speak to any particular attack. I cannot speak to any particular action. It is not appropriate for me to do that,” he said in response to a question in the backdrop of Friday’s drone strikes on North and South Waziristan, which killed 18 people.

Working: “What we are doing is we are in the process of working with the Pakistanis to help train up the counterinsurgency capability of their military, and we’re getting new agreements with them about how to deal with cross-border movements of these folks, so we are making progress,” Biden said.

Referring to US President Barack Obama’s election campaigning, Biden said the president had “said during his campaign and in the debates that if there is an actionable target, of a high-level Al Qaeda personnel, that he would not hesitate to use action to deal with that”.

He, however, praised increased cooperation by Pakistani authorities, calling the coordination ‘good news’.

“The good news is that in my last trip – and I have been to Pakistan and that region many times – there is a great deal more cooperation going on now between the Pakistan military in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Waziristan, North Waziristan – all that area that we hear about being ungovernable,” he said.

FATA: But Biden added that the areas had “been ungovernable for the Pakistani government. That’s where the bad guys are hiding. That’s where the Al Qaeda folks are, and some other malcontents”.

Biden also expressed understanding of the fact that FATA had been historically ungoverned.

According to a Pakistani embassy spokesman, agreement of views on coordination of border monitoring, improvement in intelligence-sharing and bolstering the capacity of Pakistani security forces was a continuous process between the coalition partners.

A senior official in Islamabad on Sunday said the drone attacks were counterproductive to Pakistan’s efforts aimed at curbing extremism.

On Afghanistan, Biden said the new US administration had inherited a ‘real mess’. “What’s happened is that because of a failure to provide sufficient resources, economic, political and military, as well as failure to get a coherent policy among our allies, economically and politically, and in terms of military resources, the situation has deteriorated a great deal,” he said.app

Credits: Daily Times

Why India is Behaving Like Lashkar e Tayyibah (LeT)?

 Azhar Aslam

 India today is considered by the world to be an established state. Indians think they are on the brink of acquiring super power status. LeT on the other hand is a banned organization considered to be a terrorist non-state actor. So why is it that the belligerence and jingoism Indian state and media is what would be expected of an organization like LeT. How come Indian state is behaving like a terrorist organization?

Non-state violent actors, until recently have been called mercenaries and have been used, by different powers throughout human  history.  British imperialism started its life in this shape and form, the most famous being the East India Company. Sir Drake , Sir Raleigh and other such “privateers,”  were all non state entrepreneurs who advanced state power. Lawless violence often preceded the rule of law.

More recently after the Second World War United States has employed several non-state forces in various parts of the world to further its foreign policy agenda, often at high human and economic cost to that country and its people. Ironically Afghanistan was one such theatre. The Indian support for Baluchistan insurgency is an open secret. There is a strength of evidence for Indian and US support for ‘Jihadist’ groups operating on Pakistani territories.

After the recent Mumbai attacks it has been claimed by India ( serious evidence still pending) that a non state actor  LeT has infringed its territory and perpetrated lawless violence. Indian state and its leaders are now invoking this as a reason to respond in kind.  The jingoistic antipakistani stance of Indian media and politicians is being built to hysterical levels. There have been calls to respond in ‘manner of United States’.

It is most disturbing that Indian government instead of behaving in a lawful manner befitting the largest country in the region, has tried its fullest to take ”advantage” of human misery in its own country and of its own people and made this a ‘Pakistan-centric’ event. When it should have been paying attention to healing its own wounds, India has seen it as an opportunity to salt these wounds and create fresh ones. And here the state has been led by hysterical media. That tells volume about the structural stability and framework of Indian institutions claimed to represent world’s largest democracy.

Indian state wants to behave like private bullies, justifying violence, revenge and torture just like non-state terrorists. As Arjvind Rajgopal has put it ‘War has become the preferred means of practicing politics under the guise of opposing terrorism, and it is endorsed as a sacred duty’.

 India seems to be following in USSR tradition and trying to create an aura of invincibility for its own ego satisfaction without considering the hundreds of millions of its citizens who are hungry, poor and destitute. Is the death of nearly 250 people, mayhem for a few days in one city, a little hurt ego more important than the teeming masses who linger in poverty. Should India not be concentrating its efforts on spending money for creating infrastructure for its own; of education, health, transport, economic opportunities.  Is it worth a war?

 

Common sense answer is ‘No’. So Why is it that certain parts of Indian media/intellectuals/politicians triumvirate, want India to respond in an American manner? Our analysis leads us to two reasons.

 

First, Indian leaders and intellectuals suffer from severe inferiority complex and generational anger lingering on from British Raj days. For all the talk of rising power of India and Indians taking over the world India is desperate to declare itself as a super power one way or another. Look closely at the pattern of Indian media’s coverage. It was not designed for Indian masses. It was designed to be fed to the international audience, in particular US and UK citizens, whose gullibility has no limits. And it is seems India has decided that its response to Mumbai attack, (which by the way was smaller in number of casualties compared to 1993 or 2006 or Gujrat, just to quote few examples) is going to declare to the world that it has turned into a regional or world super power.

 

India has this complex about being ‘Like America’. This is no more than a sign of serious inferiority complex and insecurity of its own identity. The most obvious sign of this inferiority complex is that the event is described as India’s 9/11, with enemy intruders committing murder and mayhem. “9/11″ has become a nationalizing mantra across the globe, an invocation to remember violence in order to garner consent for violent retaliation.

 

No one has even considered that what the world has turned into after the American response. It is not as if the world has become a safer or better place that this response should be imitated. The signs of being super in power are maturity and sagacity. It is to reach out and stand against terrorism of any kind and take other (in this case smaller) countries in the region with her. It is to lead. But has India done any of it? No sir. So forget about being super in power. India needs to set its own  house in order.

 

This brings us to the second reason behind India’s jingoistic stance. It is related to the long standing failure of Indian state. It has failed in three important respects. First, it has failed its own secularism and failed to forge an Indian nation; second it has failed its own poor in pure economic terms; and thirdly it has failed its Indianness in its eagerness to ape the west. 

Not withstanding show boys of Indian Muslims (from Abul Kalam Azaad to  M J Akbar)  there is  the increasing discrimination in civil society and the media against Muslims.  Indian state continually fails to provide justice to its minorities and masses. Then there are Dalits, Chrsitians, Bhuddists, Tamils, Naxalites. The list goes on. I quote Gopal again:’ Muslims in India have, for some time, been treated as internal enemies, through a combination of covert and overt socio-economic boycotts, state discrimination, episodes of intense political violence, and anti-terror legislation granting judicial powers to police.’

And what is Indian response to all this. For Kashmir, it blames Pakistan; for the seven sister states Bangladesh is the culprit and China takes the blame for the Naxalite insurrection. India has been in a state of perpetual war due to its ego, border disputes with all its neighbours and misplaced priorities.

Then there are pure economic issues. Here again Indian leaders ego complexes have led to failure of its own people. This failure is villainous in part and negligent to criminal extent. It is multifold and multilayered. While ‘India is shining’ for an elite minority, the masses and the land is being opened up for a new form of colonialism for Bharati and multinationals corporations, in the name of reforms and progress.

 What Indians have failed to grasp or at least have shown no capacity to put any such understanding into context is that they are seen as no more than a big economic market opportunity for western nations and corporations, due to sheer numbers. Research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) shows that within a generation, the country will become a nation of upwardly mobile middle-class households, consuming goods ranging from high-end cars to designer clothing. In two decades the country will surpass Germany as the world’s fifth largest consumer market. It is this which attracts West; not some attitudinal shift in Anglo-Saxon thinking. If they are under any illusion that suddenly Westerns have started seeing them as equal partners, all they have to do is to sit in few pubs across middle England. That shall be more than sufficient to clear such delusions of grandeur.

Consequently in the name of progress, poor are marginalized. Cities suffer from severe economic and social segregation. The slums for the poor are demolished  and ghettos moved around. Muslim and Dalits  in India are overwhelmingly concentrated in such ghettos  and, in episodes of Hindu nationalist violence, have been the principal victims of assaults. It is not India shining. It is Bollywood shining and like tinsel town it is more razz matazz than substance .   The Justice Sachar Committee, in 2006, reported that ‘the condition of Muslims had deteriorated to such a point that they were worse off than the untouchable caste, which has traditionally occupied the lowest rung of Indian society’. In some cases, Muslims are ostracized to the point of social death.

And for all the talk of famed reforms by the present Indian Prime Minister in early 1990s, when he was a finance minister, it was more a case of India being at the right place at the right time by sheer luck than any planned strategic goal achievement. Indian progress owes much to certain historical events converging fortuitously at the right time.  The collapse of USSR forced India into balance payment crisis, forcing Rao and Singh’s hand to deliver economic reforms where by Licence Raj was ended. At about the same time seeds of globalization were being sown while West was recovering form the recessions of early 1990s. The scores of English speaking graduates of IIT were now suddenly available at cheap labour adding impetus to Indian preeminence as outsourced markets. Western corporations were looking for cutting their costs and they started outsourcing. Indian diaspora played its part. Manufacturing was outsourced to China and IT services to India.  Subsequently ore reforms followed and FDI increased as western corporations themselves sought a slice of the market.

This brings us to the third Indian failure. The fact is that Indian  middle class is fast losing its ‘Desi’ values and the South Asian culture is being undermined by the still persistent and widely prevalent ‘Ghulam Zehniat’. For all the slogans of ‘new super power’, ‘largest democracy’, ‘big and powerful country’ etc, the Indianness is fast ebbing away.

Most middle class Indians feel more proud to speak, act and live and display the consumerist western lifestyle than any indigenous South Asian, Indian or Baharti lifestyle. Their tastes are indistinguishable from those of prosperous young Westerners – high-end luxury cars, designer clothes, maids and full-time cooks, and regular vacations,  abroad.

 One sign of this is the elites in Mumbai assuming that they too must respond “like America’’ and asking where their Rudy Giuliani was ? The irony is that the sign of being developed and civilized in India is no longer the welfare of its general masses in economic and social terms but ‘ State terrorism and war’.  

Like Pakistan Television is being watched increasingly in India and nearly two thirds of the population has now access to television.  And it is very profitable.  Consequently there is intense competition in news sector and live TV. Many of 24 hour channels are owned by transnational media corporations. And Like Pakistan a disproportionate number of prime time viewers tune into news channels (perhaps due to the age old Sub continental taste for politics).  Consequently this was the first attack that was being telecast and watched live. It seems that even the planners of these attacks knew this and planned to take full advantage of the global audience on offer. The death of V P Singh and eight people in Tamil Nadu rains from 26 to 29^th November went nearly unmentioned. To quote ‘They died unmourned and even unmentioned on the explosive screens that kept millions enthralled’.

As some Indian pundits have asked that while media fixated on ‘who’ and ‘how’ for these attacks, ‘why’ was completely ignored. It is the media which seems to be leading the response of Indian State rather than the other way round. In other words, the corporate agendas of the media owners has dictated the response of Indian rulers and Indian state.  The proof of sympathy to the upwardly mobile middle class urbanites it seems is war with Pakistan at the cost of teeming poor and destitute billions. As Gopal points out that the  ‘the media in India is only nominally public. …it is elite who own the space and dictate the terms of its discourse. In the recent attacks hardly any attention was paid to the railway station where sixty people were killed. TV crews stayed focused on the luxury hotels, where “People Like Us” were affected.’ To quote J S Raman ‘The elite of Mumbai and elsewhere, mourning the fall of the elegant Taj, have been trying to sound tougher than even the politicians of the Parivar (the Far Right “family”).’

 

We thus see that these three fundamental failures of Indian State that have either incapacitated the senses of Indian State and its rulers and they are being unwillingly led by the media or they have simply become complicit in the dangerous egocentric brinksmanship regardless of the cost to people of Subcontinent.  That the complex to ‘be big’ and ‘super power’ is fuelling this on cannot be doubted. But the world is watching. And India must take a note. The very status it craves for more than anything else is under threat due to its childish and amateurish actions.  The more it acts like ‘Non-State’ actor the more it risks its status in the comity of nations.