THARPARKAR: Educationists and activists have said education is the only ray of hope for the emancipation of the depressed and deprived people of the Tharparkar desert, and that political interference in the education department is the main reason for the dismal state of education in Thar. They called for an arid agriculture university to be set up in Thar, a special quota for Thari students in technical institutions and universities, and for 2014 to be declared a year of educational emergency in Tharparkar.
Addressing a seminar titled “Status of Education and Future of Thar”, organised by the civil society organisation AWARE, veteran poet and educationist Haleem Baghi said quality education was a source of lasting peace, pluralism and sustainable development in any area. Without the promotion of education, material development alone could never be sustained, he said.
District Education Officer (Elementary) Fakir Umeed Ali Nohri said political interference by the area’s elected representatives had left the education department unable to provide quality education in Thar. He said teachers had been found absent from school for up to four months but had not been punished because of political intervention.
Veteran social activist Gotam Rathi said uneducated Tharis were easy for vested interests to suppress and deprive, which was why those forces did not want to see Tharis become literate.
Woman activist Fatima Saund said Thari people were living in such a precarious situation that meeting basic needs had become more important to them than the right to quality education.
Writer and activist Ali Akbar Rahimoo said elected representatives from Tharparkar should stop interfering in the education department, and that 2014 should be observed as an emergency year for education in the district. He said 221,203 children were enrolled from primary to higher secondary level. Strikingly, only 374 children had reached intermediate level, compared with 15,793 in class five and 3,573 in matriculation. This showed a very low transition rate from primary school to matriculation and intermediate in Tharparkar. Only 2 per cent of students enrolled in primary schools reached graduation or university level.
Researcher Jan Mohammad Samoo said there were 568 female teachers for 607 girls’ primary schools, and 180 of them had received no teacher training. Of the 607 girls’ primary schools, 282 had no building, 229 had no boundary wall and 189 had drinking water. These conditions had led to the very poor state of girls’ primary education in the district. In 2011, only 409 of the 607 girls’ schools received free textbooks. He added that the government’s 2011 school census showed 731 primary schools were closed, while other sources put the number of closed primary schools at about 1,600.
Mohammad Sharif Rahimoo criticised the quality of education in Tharparkar district, citing recent research showing that 37 per cent of class-one children could read only letters in Sindhi and 1.6 per cent could read simple Sindhi sentences. Some 84 per cent of class-one children could not read anything in English, and about 5 per cent knew lowercase English letters. In arithmetic, about 12 per cent of class-one children knew numbers only up to 99, while only 10 to 18 per cent of class-five children could do two- and three-digit subtraction and division.
Educationist Kale Khan Bajeer said the learning environment in Tharparkar’s schools did not meet learning needs, and that most schools lacked child-centred teaching. He stressed the need for effective monitoring and support for teachers at school level to improve the quality of education in Thar.
Noor Mohammad Nohri, Haji Jeearo Saund, Azizullah, Keshav Lal and others said teachers and officials used strong influence and unethical means to avoid being held accountable for their performance, which also demotivated hard-working teachers. They said free textbooks did not reach all schools, and in many schools there were not enough books for the number of children.