KARACHI, April 1: A 100 per cent literacy rate will be achieved in three years in Karachi, City Nazim Naimatullah Khan said at a press conference on Monday.

Sindh is the first province to declare primary education compulsory for all children between the age group of 5 and 11 years. The provincial government has already issued a notification pursuant to Section 1 (2) of the Sindh Compulsory Primary Education Ordinance 2001. Governor Mohammedmian Soomro will formally launch the scheme on April 2 from the CMS High School, Lyari.

Naimatullah Khan, who was accompanied by DCO Shafiqur Rehman Paracha at the press conference, referred to the importance of CMS High School, which was the first educational institute where Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had got admission.

Though the provincial government has directed all the district governments to select at least one of their towns/talukas for launching of the programme, the city government Karachi has selected five Towns from where the drive will be started initially, while work on the scheme will continue in other Towns.

The selected five Towns and their population are: Orangi, 7,21,694; Lyari, 6,07,992; Shah Faisal, 3,35,283; Gulberg, 4,53,490; and Gadap, 2,87,564.

The city Nazim said although Karachi had a highest literacy rate in the country, but he was not satisfied with the situation and maintained that the target of the city government was to enhance the rate to 100 per cent in the next three years.

There are about 3,804 public sector educational institutes in the city, where about seven hundred thousand students are enrolled, while the approximate population of the school-going children, between the age of 5 and 11 years, in the five selected towns is 4,33,181.

The main objective of the programme is to persuade parents and guardians to send all such children to schools, the Nazim said.

He said incentives would be given to the children in the shape of free uniforms, textbooks and even a stipend of Rs50 to each needy pupil.

The Nazim expressed the hope that the programme would achieve its desired results with the help of elected representatives as well as officials of the education department.

Strict monitoring would be carried out by Town Nazims and the city government to control corruption, he said, adding that Rs4,000 per room had been allocated to all the public sector primary schools to upgrade their existing facilities with a directive to form school management committees, consisting of elected representatives and notables of the area.

DCO Karachi said the scheme was being financed under the annual development programme, while about Rs6.6 million had been released from the President’s Special Fund for Education and 38 thousand sets of textbooks had also been handed over to the city government. Another 68 thousand textbooks are in the pipeline, he added.

The DCO informed that at present the education department had huge potentials with an average teacher-student ratio of 1:18. However, the target is to keep the ratio at 1:30 in the long run, he added.

With a population of about 24,6,563, the five towns have only 887 public sector primary schools belonging to the former district municipal corporations and the provincial government, but now all of them have come under the city government.

The main targets of the campaign are the working children and those living in slum and remote areas who do not understand the importance of education.—PPI