THE Punjab government’s educational reforms have been more of a show-off and less meaningful in implementation.

The Daanish School system makes an excellent case if we are talking about a ‘strategic disaster’. Instead of improving the overall infrastructure of schools in all villages, funds have been wasted on heavy construction of new buildings for Daanish Schools which have facilitated the masses in no way. Not even 10 per cent of the total government schoolgoing poor population has availed itself of the scheme actually because most of the children in rural areas continue to attend local schools with utterly unacademic environments and ‘ancient’ curricula.

The laptop scheme, introduced by the Punjab government, has been another ‘policy level’ disaster in the education sector. The same amount could have been spent on improving the existing infrastructure of government schools, scholarship grants for deserving students, research grants to agricultural and engineering universities, or improving secondary and higher secondary school curricula.

On the contrary, I have seen an increase in the amount of cheap poetry and images being shared on social networking sites since the execution of laptops scheme and installation of free wi-fi facilities at several government universities. It is a request to the Punjab government to carry out a thorough audit of their educational schemes/reforms, and appraise their performance in terms of meaningful implementation of projects which maximise benefits to the masses in the long run.

BAHAWAL SHAHRYAR
Lahore