PESHAWAR: In the wake of serious threats of militant attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the education and police departments have been literally shifting the responsibility of providing security to educational institutions to each other, according to officials.

Senior officials in the Elementary and Secondary Education (E&SE) Department are of the view that the education department is responsible to impart knowledge to the students through its teachers rather than providing them guns to fight terrorists.

“Now we should also provide commando training to our teachers along with the teaching methodologies,” said one of the district education officers sarcastically, while talking to Dawn. “Our duty is teaching and not fighting with terrorists,” he said.

Police, education depts shifting responsibility on each other

The educationist said that the education department had taken an unwise decision of providing guns to the watchmen in the government schools after the militant attack on the Army Public School, Peshawar, on Dec 16, 2014. He said that after the bloodbath in APS a year ago and the recent attack on Bacha Khan University, Charsadda, schools were considered soft targets of the militants.

On the other side, a senior police officer told Dawn that deployment of police personnel at each and every educational institution was impossible. He said that there were around 64,000 educational institutions in the province, both public and private, including schools, colleges and universities.

“The total strength of police from the constable to IGP is 68,000,” he said, adding that all the police couldn’t be deployed for the security of 64,000 educational institutions in the province.

He said that the police had to not only work for the protection of educational institutions, but also to control other crimes, gather information, conduct investigations, perform VIP duties, etc.

The police officer said that so far the police department had registered FIRs against the owners and headmasters of 683 institutions, including 569 schools, 23 colleges and a university for inadequate security arrangements. He said that the FIRs had been registered under The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sensitive and Vulnerable Establishments and Places Act, 2015.

He said that the educational institutions had to follow the standard operating procedures (SOPs) set by the police department after the APS attack. Under the SOPs, the police officer said, the institutions were required to increase the height of the boundary wall to 10 feet and fix barbed wire on it, set up watch towers on the roofs, install closed-circuit television cameras, provide guns to the security guards, etc.

Sources in the education department told Dawn that at a recent meeting of the district education officers, a senior education officer said that they needed to make fortress-like schools after it was discussed that a watchman might not be able to provide security to the government schools in their existing buildings.

The Private Schools Association has also expressed concern over the registration of FIRs against owners of the schools. Talking to Dawn, the owners of the private schools said that it was the provincial government’s responsibility to take measures for averting attacks on schools.

They said that the registration of FIRs was an injustice with them and termed it a hurdle to spreading of education in the society.

Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2016