SINDH has fallen far behind the world in terms of quality education, as the demand for better schools is growing rapidly while the supply of quality schools is just not keeping pace.

About five million children have missed the boat of formal education for one reason or another but mostly due to lack of resources. The overall goal must be to select the most literate from among them, approximately 10 per cent or 500,000, and train them in vocational training via Hunar centres.

The schoolgoing children are about 10 million, out of which about half are registered in government schools while the rest in various trust and private schools. Quality education is imparted to some 10 per cent of them, say one million students. The rest are just carrying paper degrees with little or no knowledge.

Unfortunately, less than half out of this one million get a chance to go to a good school with proper teachers, furniture and facilities.

The Sindh government has about 300,000 employees, with approximately 150,000 teachers and 150,000 other school staff, and spends on an average Rs20,000 per employee per month. This comes to a staggering amount of approximately Rs70 billion a year. Further, on 50,000 government school repairs and maintenance, the government spends about Rs50,000 per school per month which also comes to a staggering amount of Rs30 billion.

The combined spending is about Rs100 billion. Although all this is paid by local taxpayers, the result and quality, in return of this Rs100 billion, is not up to the mark in most government schools.

Clearly, the Sindh government needs to bring great improvement in this very important department if it honestly wishes to win back its voters.

A few important steps required to bring improvement are follows:

Have the HEC identify all fake degree holders in the education department and replace them with properly qualified teachers. This will remove all ghost teachers and replace all fake teachers from the education department and give an opportunity for proper qualified teachers to be hired instead.

NESPAK should identify all ghost schools in the education department and remove them immediately from the maintained list of active schools, and consolidate remaining schools with one- school, one- campus model. This will bring down government schools to about 1,000 per district maximum, all must be in concentrated populated areas, and will total about 25,000 maximum Sindh government schools, and utilise the funds saved from 25,000 ghost schools on proper facilities of the remaining 25,000 schools.

In brief, if the Sindh education department is, in the five-year term of the government, even able to do the above two things properly, it will bring considerable improvement for education for low- income persons. This is their due right, and the Sindh government must strive hard to achieve this and stop the gaping hole of public fund wastage.

What the Sindh government does in the next 30 days will determine if it is setting the course in the right direction. Hope the chief minister brings in the best person.

Z.H. EFFENDIKarachi