LAHORE: The Punjab government has plans in hand to develop cooperation with Sri Lanka to learn from its strengths in religious and cultural tourism, hospitality industry, archaeology and other sectors – in a bid to benefit from best models in the world.

The provincial government may suggest the Sri Lankan government to open a cultural centre in Punjab to promote cultural exchanges as well as religious tourism in Taxila that boasts of having Buddhist stupas. Buddhism had flourished and prevailed in this part of the region for over 1,000 years.

The Punjab government will also showcase its strengths as well as exhibit Buddhism artifacts in Sri Lanka on the sidelines of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s proposed visit soon. The Punjab government has identified tourism, hospitality industry, archaeology, information and culture, forestry and wildlife.

While, Punjab Additional Chief Secretary Shamail Ahmad Khwaja along with administrative secretaries of line departments will brief the chief minister about areas for cooperation with Sri Lanka on Friday (today), he had a detailed preparatory meeting in civil secretariat on Thursday and identified different areas for mutual cooperation.

Following the meeting, Mr Khwaja told Dawn that the provincial government might suggest the Sri Lankan government to open its cultural centre in Punjab and added that the government would take along some 150 Buddhism artifacts to showcase them at an exhibition.

Referring to energy sector, he said Punjab would examine how Sri Lanka managed that almost every house in Colombo had a solar panel on its rooftop.

He said Sri Lanka had very effectively controlled its population (despite staunch Buddhism) that stood around 20 million, which gave it power to effectively utilise its resources and earned laurels in all fields including education and health sectors.

Explaining that 80 per cent of Sri Lankan population is residing in urban areas, he said, “We will learn from Sri Lanka how it achieved highest literacy rate with quality teaching as well as three-year pre-service teachers’ training.”

Punjab has an inherent problem that almost 70 per cent of population is residing in rural areas, where high quality services could not be provided due to scarce resources coupled with population explosion.

In education sector, Punjab may put up a proposal to launch split degree four-year BS (Honours) programmes in Punjab and Sri Lankan universities. It has been reported that Sri Lanka has second highest education indicators in the region including 1-18 teacher-student ratio. In Sri Lanka, there are 9,675 schools having enrolment of some 4.1 million students.

Mr Khwaja said Punjab also had strength in terms of recruitment of teachers on merit, digitization of all 53,000 schools in the province as well as on-ground surveillance system being carried out by district monitoring officers and monitoring and evaluation assistants.

He said the Punjab government would also like to benefit from Sri Lanka in wildlife and forestry sector to protect and develop national wildlife parks in the province. It is learnt that a working group is also being constituted to explore the avenues of exchange of wildlife rare species.

In the health sector, he said Punjab would also like to study its primary healthcare system, Well Women Clinics as well as training of nurses.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2016