‘Education for all’ slogan, and valley of Parsan

Amir Khan

According to media reports, Pakistan celebrated education and Malala day with the hope that the government will provide equal education opportunities to everyone.

The government has also launched a four-year literacy programme under which more than three million children of poor families, especially girls, will get free education in Pakistan. Unfortunately, despite the declining graph of education system, the government is just doing cosmetic steps to satisfy people. The actual condition of education is far from ideal in Pakistan.

Education is the response to challenges of the cosmic creative force. Response must equal the challenges otherwise the individual and hence society will continue facing stagnation, decay and disintegration. Chitral is an administrative district in the extreme north of the KP province of Pakistan. There are many educational institutions working in Chitral imparting general education but no technical and vocational institute is operating both in private and government. The district has 98 per cent literacy rate, the highest in the NWFP.

There are over 600 primary schools for boys and girls in the district. But some of the villages are still facing educational problems. One such valley is Parsan, Karimabad. Though Parsan has an outstanding performance in education, our encouraging aspect of the situation is that we are in 2nd position as compared to other villages of Chitral, having a literacy rate of 91pc. There are government schools but none of them is at the secondary level and students have to travel a long distance from Parsan to Susum.

We came across the destructive floods and earthquakes, yet the most heart wrenching incident occurred on March 19. We lost our little school going souls who were swallowed by an avalanche while they were returning homes after attempting the matriculation papers. No one knew that they had parted from their families in the morning to never return! Though it was hardly two or three hours’ paper that made them go through those risky and several spans snow covered hills, or the lack of examination centre near, and poor BISEP‬ management and dull secretariat education‬ in Chitral that drew them very close to the famished mouth of death.

We know not, what we know is, we have lost the innocent souls! This all happen due to far distance, lack of availability of secondary school and lack of examination centre in Parsan. Enrolment with education institutions is fairly unequal in our area. But still after the Parsan valley awaits progress and prosperity of the locals.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ My humble suggestion and request to government functionaries and public representatives is we should not indulge in an unnecessary point scoring.

I am sure you will agree with me that the problems connected with education business are highly complex and are multiplying exponentially day by day as the run-of-the-mill performance shown by all those associated with this important department in one capacity or the other has miserably failed to produce the desired results. It is a time to awake the government functionaries, public representatives of Chitral to make a possible measure and take initiative toward Karimabad valley especially in Parsan valley.

Help the valley to build a secondary level school for Parsanians. For upcoming years the government and BISEP should have to make a strategy to conduct the examination somewhere in Parsan in order to minimize future uncertainty. Education is the key to development. A country cannot develop economically unless her literacy rate is accelerated.