KARACHI: Air traffic in Pakistan has doubled during the last two years, bringing to the PIA a net profit of about Rs92 lakhs during 1960-61. The happy situation fits in the PIA’s programme to offer the air traveller the best possible equipment and services and to extend rapid and economical transportation to as many areas of the country as facilities permit.

It was a modest but happy managing director who released the annual report to newsmen yesterday. In all the spheres, the figures spoke for themselves, but the Managing Director, Air Commodore Nur Khan, supplemented the information when and where required.

The report, an elaborate document, spoke of the increases in revenue and traffic, new marks reached in technical and engineering fields, ever-increasing operations and the accompanying boost in commercial and sales sectors.

The report dealt with the touchy question of personnel. To the newsmen who wanted to know whether the administration was top-heavy, Air Commodore Nur Khan replied: “We are a commercial organisation and we pay to get bigger returns.” He said unlike some other institutions, PIA could claim to have a staff which has developed a sense of pride in the organisation. And this, he said, counts a lot in the airlines business.

Novel method of raising ‘prestige’

KARACHI: The Director of Education, Syed Ghulam Mustafa Shah, is personally holding an inquiry into a ‘prestige-boosting’ racket started by a number of expensive schools in Karachi, it is learnt.

The inquiry is being made following a press report exposing this racket which adversely affects hundreds of students. Some schools, which have the reputation of being first-class institutions, whose pupils never fall or pass in the third division, send up for matriculation examination only those students who are likely to get first divisions.

In these schools, pupils are openly ‘advised’ by teachers to appear as private candidates if they are unlikely to pass with distinction. This is the reason why these big schools sometimes send as few as five or six students to appear in the matriculation examination.