I AM a final year undergraduate student living in Dera Ismail Khan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. My name was on the merit list for the government-sponsored laptop scheme, but I have never received the laptop. This is not an isolated case, I am sure. Since 2009, the Education Endowment Fund in Punjab has awarded nearly half-a-million scholarships worth Rs30 billion, and its laptop programme distributed over 110,000 laptops in 2025.

The parallel body in KP has registered cumulative scholarships worth Rs306 million, which is but a fraction of Punjab’s disbursement. Although KP does not have a permanent provincial laptop project, students in the province have been provided with approximately 76,000 laptops under the Prime Minister’s Youth Laptop Scheme, while Punjab has provided 247,000. The KP government had earlier made a public commitment to match Punjab’s coverage percentage for percentage, but that promise remained just that; a promise.

None of this implies at all that the KP government had failed completely or that Punjab’s system is perfect. Scale, continuity and institutional capacity, however, were clearly different, and students from smaller districts and in public-sector colleges were the ones who had tyo bear the brunt of that difference. Devolution must have meaning, and opportunities for students must not diminish at the provincial border.

KP should have a permanent scholar-ship fund and a laptop programme with fixed and published annual targets, rather than announcements made in response to actions taken elsewhere. Otherwise, the ambitions of people in areas like Dera Ismail Khan will tragically continue to be defeated by an accident of geography.

Raheel Hussain
Dera Ismail Khan

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2026