05 June 2004	Saturday	16 Rabi-us-Saani 1425

LAHORE, June 4: The education policy of the Punjab government is based on increasing schools' enrolment, reducing dropouts, ensuring quality, training teachers and creating private-public partnerships.

Provincial Education Minister Mian Imran Masood made this statement while starting a general discussion on education in the Punjab Assembly on Friday.The minister claimed that poverty was the main cause for lack of education in the province.

On the basis of this assumption, the government decided to launch free education plan at an additional cost of Rs1 billion. A sum of Rs500 million had been kept for scholarships and Rs420 million for free books.

The government also realised that gender balance in education was grossly in favour of boys. It decided to take extra measures for correcting this imbalance by starting a Rs200 stipend for girls scoring 80 per cent attendance in 16 selected districts of the province.

The government also started distributing free books among all students in the province at a cost of Rs420 million, which was unprecedented in the history of Pakistan. The government started various schemes to involve private investors in the process of managing schools, he said.

Education is such a big sector that Rs42 billion are consumed by salaries of teachers in 63,117 schools in the province that teach nine million students. The present education policy was formulated in 1998 and adopted by the present government with some modifications.

This admission by the education minister provoked Rana Sana Ullah of the PML-N into accusing the government of failing to develop its own policy. On a point of order, he said, the government neither had an education policy nor a policy statement in this regard.

It would have been better had someone from the opposition started the debate. He claimed that the minister had nothing to contribute to the discussion and the opposition could have done better.

Sami Ullah Khan of the PPP said that education had ceased to be government's priority. In the early 90s, the government used to spend 2.6 per cent of the gross domestic production on education, which had now come down to 1.8 per cent.

People could not be befooled by heavy bombardment of advertisements. Figures speak for themselves. School-student and teacher-student ratios were less in Punjab than any other province.

But the government still had the audacity to claim creation of an educated Punjab. The gulf between government's claims and deeds was too big to be bridged by advertisement campaigns, he said.

Out of 63,000 schools, 8,923 had no boundary wall, 15,062 no water and 22,567 no electricity. If this was the way to educate the entire Punjab, the government should have a look on its education policy and rhetoric, he said.