KARACHI, Nov 22: Sindh Education Minister Hamida Khuhro said on Tuesday that free education up to high school would be introduced in the province from the academic session 2006.

She was speaking at a seminar, the last segment of a two-day media orientation workshop on “Education for all”, organized by the Pakistan Press Foundation in collaboration with Unesco.

“Students would get free textbooks besides a stipend of Rs100 for regular attendance,” the minister added.

Over 30 journalists drawn from different districts of Sindh, including Karachi, representing national and local dailies and electronic media attended the workshop.

Dr Khuhro rejected the notion that the federal government had allocated a mere 1.8 per cent of the GDP for education. She said that the federal minister for education told in a meeting that the budgetary allocation during the current fiscal for education was 2.7 per cent of the GDP. The allocations would be enhanced to 4 per cent in next two years, she added.

Dr Khuhro said that the government had sufficient funds. The only thing needed was the political will and motivation.

Referring to the situation prevailing in Sindh, the minister said there was a dismal situation in the province having thousands of shelter less schools besides the schools devoid of all the basic facilities like water, toilets, electricity, boundary walls etc.

“We want to lay down a comprehensive education plan to improve the situation,” she said.

The minister was of the view that there was a wide gap between the primary, secondary and higher secondary schools in the province that again were faced with shortage of teachers.

The Higher Education Commission is focussing on producing specialized persons but such targets could not be achieved if the foundation is not made sound, she added.

“We have recruited some teachers and more would be recruited soon. We will impart training to these teachers before they join the duties so that they could be able to impart quality education,” Dr Khuhro said.

She told that a Reform Support Unit was being set up to monitor and evaluate the progress made towards achieving the goal besides creating a database and networking of all the educational institutions.

The government is also introducing English as a subject from class one but this should not be construed as negating the local languages. In fact, it would be totally against the interest of people not to teach English to their children, she viewed.

To a question from the participants, the minister told that the chairman of the Sindh Textbook Board had denied that a lesson about Shah Abdul Karim of Bulri, a Sufi poet of Sindh, was being deleted from the textbooks.

Earlier, chairperson of the Sindh Education Foundation and former provincial education minister Prof Anita Ghulamali in her speech called for imparting primary education to the children in their mother tongues.

“I had been advocating that the basic education should be in the language in which a child dreams and that is his mother tongue,” she observed.

She also emphasized on enhancing the budgetary allocations for the education sector at least up to 4 per cent of the GDP.

Senior journalist Sabihuddin Ghausi lamented that money was the priority of the media organizations that could be testified by the fact that the newspapers were full of advertisements, even their front and back pages, leaving very little space for social issues.

Prof Shahida Qazi, former chairperson of the KU’s mass communication department, deplored that the VIPs and philanthropists often visited and offered donations to the well-off institutions instead of those in dire need of assistance.

Earlier, Unesco representative from Islamabad, Arshad Saeed and PPF Secretary-General Owais Aslam Ali also spoke.—PPI