Female students decry lack of transport

CHITRAL, Oct 2: Students in all government college in the valley are facing immense problems due to lack of transport facilities and the hard hit are girls who have to walk for long distances to and from schools come rain or shine. 

The problem has been raised at many forums and even the chief minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti had promised during one of his visit to Chitral and Booni that the government would provide buses for the educational institutions. But no substantial steps have been taken to resolve the longstanding issue.

On Tuesday, the students of Govt Girls High School Chitral demanded proper transportation facilities and added that every day about 100 girls were being crammed into a rickety bus having a seating capacity of only 32. In a press statement, the parents, including Alamzeb Fayyaz Khan and Syed Ahmed Shah, said overloading of students can cause a fatal accident anytime while during the last summer season a number of students had fainted due to suffocation.

They said that if the vehicles are overloaded by three times to their capacities, then they will be rendered out of order and no transport facility will be available to pick and drop more than fifteen hundred girls of the college who use the transport. The parents said that the college was the only one in the public sector but the government is not serious to provide facilities to it while transport surfaced as the most serious problem and its unavailability will force the students to discontinue their studies.

They said that like the other cities of the province, there was no public transport available in Chitral and the college buses were the only source of transportation. They also complained that the fares of the college have also been fixed at exorbitant rates which are almost double than that of the private sector college on routes of equivalent lengths.

The parents also complained acute shortage of drinking water in the college and said that their daughters carry the commodity with themselves in bottles every day or they are forced to consume the highly contaminated water. They said that for hygienic environment in the college premises, the availability of sufficient quantity of water was inevitable which houses more than three thousand students.–Zahiruddin