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IN an article about Google taking steps to curb online piracy of music on the BBC, I recently came across some fascinating figures that illustrate the stupendously high volume of internet traffic and the technology that makes this possible. The British Phonographic Industry, which is concerned with music trade, made 43.3 million requests that Google should remove certain search results because of copyright issues — and this is only in 2013. The equivalent group for the US, the Recording Industry Association of America, made 31.6 million such requests in the same period.
As a result of complaints, Google removed 222 million results from search because of copyright infringement, and 300 million videos have been “claimed” by rights holders, which means they can place advertising on them. But I save the figure I found most extraordinary for the last: Google’s Content ID system, which detects copyrighted material, scans 400 years-worth of video — every day.
As a counterpoint, out here in Pakistan, we still have to whine about our right to access YouTube.
While the world makes progress, we seem to be fighting it.
In recent days the world of science and technology has seen some remarkable progress. Consider, for example, what Australian surgeons announced on Friday: they had successfully used in human transplants hearts that had stopped beating, ie after the circulatory death of the donor had already taken place. In other words, what the doctors at Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute have managed is to develop a technique to reanimate the organ that had been still — dead — for 20 minutes, and then transplant it into a recipient.
The implications of this are breathtaking, given that doctors have so far had to use the still-beating hearts of brain-dead donors, which means there are severe time and proximity constraints.
Out here, though, such a development — of being able to raise an organ from the dead — would no doubt be met with outrage on religious grounds and the police would be approached to register a case.
The bizarre reality about Pakistan is that while the world is making all sorts of progress that begins from the single, most basic point of literacy and education, this country seems to in effect be fighting a war against it. It is not just the schools that keep getting blown up by militants and not reconstructed by an inattentive state; it is also the fact that schools provide an ‘education’ that goes barely beyond literacy, closes minds rather than opens them, dishes out misinformation and generates a damaging, limiting, skewed narrative.
Why is Pakistan so bent on raising generations of ill-educated, under-informed people when it is so desperately in need of a talented workforce? One could answer, for the same reasons as it refuses to pay any attention to serious health risks. Left to its own devices, from the amount of effort state and society are putting in on the polio front, for example, it would appear that there’s hardly any concern about the possibility of the next generation being crippled.
It isn’t that there is a shortage of information, or of facts and figures, or of warnings that would make any nation wanting to invest in its own future pull up short and urgently start reversing course. It was only last week that education campaigners Alif Ailaan told us that of the children that manage to enrol in school at all, only one in four make it to Grade 10. There are some 25 million children in Pakistan that have dropped out of school, for reasons varying from the need to earn to poverty to inaccessibility of school and corporal punishment that is rampant in schools across the country.
On top of these sad figures, there are tens of millions of children who never get enrolled in school at all. And over and above that, as the Education Emergency report reminded in 2011, of the children that are in school, extremely few show the academic levels that the grade they are in would indicate. Their survey found that only 35pc of schoolchildren aged between six and 16 could read a story, while 50pc could not read a sentence. That report also told us a few other fun facts: there are 26 countries that are poorer than Pakistan but send more children to school; at the then rates of progress (and it hasn’t improved much at all), no person alive in Pakistan today will ever see a Pakistan with universal education; Balochistan has no chance of seeing it before 2100.
There’s no danger, then, of Pakistan becoming a hub of science and technology any time soon. And yet, there are more than a few people of Pakistani origin amongst some of the finest minds in other parts of the world in the medical, technological and other sciences.
What do you do with a country bent on suicide?
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2014
