The National Book Foundation plans to set up book clubs across the country, focusing particularly on remote villages. This praiseworthy initiative can potentially be achieved with relative ease since — as the NBF notes — all that is required is to supplement the collections already owned by people such as schoolmasters, and then to set up systems allowing access to the community. Writers and literary scholars are also to be invited to hold readings at these village book clubs.

The planned initiative is important since reading for either pleasure or information is a dying habit. Rapid advances in digital technology have led people towards other means of diversion, particularly in Pakistan where a poor literacy rate exists alongside a deteriorating state education system and a boom in the electronic media. In this situation, creating forums that allow people access to books on a range of subjects will help the literate to educate themselves — the two terms are not synonymous. Meanwhile, there is an urgent need to set up more libraries and facilitate the general public’s access to the few that do exist.

Most importantly, however, such efforts to raise the general intellectual bar of the country must be underpinned by an effective and efficient educational system to which every citizen has equal access. Unesco’s latest Global Monitoring Report estimates that the country’s literacy rate currently hovers around 50 per cent, a figure supported by last year’s National Economic Survey. However, the latter also noted significant disparities in the comparative literacy rates for not only men and women, but also in the four provinces, with the literacy rate in Balochistan averaging at about 33 per cent.

In the interests of harnessing the human potential of the country, it is incumbent upon the state to increase investment in educational infrastructure, syllabus improvement, teacher-training and related issues. Girls’ schools in particular have become targets of terrorism in some parts. This trend must be stamped out, for until the overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s children go to school without fear or discrimination, efforts such as that of the National Book Foundation will remain a drop in the ocean.