HYDERABAD, Jan 30: A teachers recruitment board, headed by a retired judge of the Sindh High Court and comprising eminent educationists, is being appointed to recruit teachers up to grade-10.

This was said by the secretary for education, Sindh, Nazar Hussain Mahar, while talking to Dawn at the circuit house on Tuesday night.

He said that Rs160 million had been released to provide free text books to the students of rural areas and katcha abadis from class 1 to class five through the district governments before the next academic session.

He said the Sindh government had earmarked Rs14 billion for the promotion of education. The government had also earmarked Rs20 million for awarding merit scholarships to the brilliant students of the middle schools and Rs10 million to the students of the secondary schools.

In addition to this, he said, Rs1 billion had been allocated for the purchase of furniture, repairs of school buildings and other equipments and added that Rs98 million had been allocated for Hyderabad district alone.

Mr Mahar pointed out that the private schools were a great challenge to the public sector schools notwithstanding the fact that the Sindh government spent two to three times more on the salaries of the teachers when compared to the teachers of the private educational institutions. The government was paying Rs13 billion to the teachers, excluding university teachers, yet the performance of the private educational institutions was far better than the government schools, he said.

There was no accountability and no checks on the government schools as a result of which the quality of education had deteriorated. He said, in order to combat this situation, school management committees were being constituted which would include the representatives of parents, teachers and educationists and added that in the long run these committees would be empowered to take action against the absent and inefficient teachers whose services could also be terminated by the committees.

The secretary for education said that thousands of teachers were untrained and added that the government would now give priority to the training of teachers. He said the situation could be gauged from the fact that out of 2675 teachers, who appeared in the examination for the posts of junior school teachers, only 481 had passed the examinations.

He said that 5,000 teachers for teaching English would be posted in schools.

He further said that the English language was the foundation of the entire educational system.