LAHORE: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf Punjab President Ejaz Chaudhry has said the latest Alif Ailaan report has acknowledged PTI government’s efforts towards education reforms in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

On the other hand, there is a drastic decrease in Punjab’s test scores based on the arithmetic average of enrolment, learning, retention and gender parity.

In a statement issued here on Friday, he said the Sharif brothers had been ruling Punjab for 30 years, but they had not been able to change the fate of public schools in the province.

He questioned what was the performance of flashy Danish schools. “Danish schools cannot even create a stir in improving the education and literacy indicators touching humiliating low rankings in the province,” he added.

He said Punjab had the highest number of out-of-school children but Shahbaz Sharif kept on wasting resources on useless mega projects.

Secretary-general Dr Yasmin Rashid said that Shahbaz Sharif was coming up with a new drama where parliamentarians would adopt schools in the province.

She said that Shahbaz Sharif’s every experiment with the education department led to darkening the future of the children, yet he kept playing with the future of the nation’s out-of-school children.

She said education not roads and metros were important for the country’s future.

Information secretary Andleeb Abbas said that Shahbaz Sharif was fooling himself by spending billions on showy projects but not providing educational opportunities to millions of out-of-school children in the province.

She said society’s apathy to sectarianism and extremism was the result of illiteracy and it had already started taking a disastrous toll.

She said that Shahbaz Sharif was diverting money to flashy projects for political gains. She questioned, why he could not think for the future of the next generation.

She said how one could expect to have any hope from the Sharif brothers when they had achieved nothing except personal fortunes from their tenures in governments.

She said that cheap stunts like laptops, Danish schools and Metro buses were staged to buy votes.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2015

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