KARACHI, June 14: The Compulsory Primary Education Ordinance 2001 will be implemented phase-wise in Sindh within a period of five years.

Additional Education Secretary Prof Anwar Ahmed Zai, while addressing the meeting of Shura-i-Hamdard, said the first phase of the programme had already been introduced in 20 out of 102 towns in the province in April 2002.

The towns where the scheme has been implemented are five in Karachi and 15 in the interior of Sindh. Under the programme no fee would be charged from students in class 1 to 10 in government schools, he said, adding that Sindh was the first province to have taken this decision.

Children from 5 to 11 years of age would be brought in the primary education net and the condition of uniform had been abolished.

Prof Zai said the government had distributed free textbooks, worth Rs172 million, in the province and councillors and Nazims were included in the work of distribution.

He said parents/teachers management committees, comprising 11 members (four from school and seven from outside) were formed to monitor the performance of teachers and schools.

The additional education secretary said schools of compulsory primary education would be equally accessible to boys and girls, while teachers would only be women. English would be a compulsory subject for class 1, he added.

He mentioned that parents would be punished if they failed to send their children to study without sound reasons.

“Making primary education compulsory we kept in mind the reasons for acute poverty and change of residence,” he observed.

Prof Zai said the literacy rate in Sindh came to around 46.7 per cent while women literacy in rural areas was 13.11 per cent.

He said bridging the literacy gap between men and women had emerged to be a real problem and the provincial government had disbursed an amount of one billion rupees among the district governments, besides granting 23,000 scholarships, to improve the existent literacy rate.—APP