ADVERSELY impacting the poor, Pakistan’s state of public education is nothing short of a

national crisis. The results of decades of neglect towards education investment are aptly
illustrated in Alif Ailaan‘s report Pakistan District Education Rankings, 2016. For its fourth
edition, the advocacy group tracked the performance of 151 districts in the country, only to
find a decrease in overall education quality and infrastructure. Alarmingly, 81pc of all
government schools operate as primary schools (that is 124,070 primary schools) and the
remaining as middle, higher or higher secondary schools. These figures indicate that the
state can provide only one in five children with an opportunity to continue his or her
schooling. This is a violation of constitutional rights — under Article 24-A, the state is
responsible for educating each child up to the age of 16.This crisis will cause Pakistan to
miss the SDG of inclusive and equitable education, just as the country failed to meet the
MDGs.

ALTHOUGH Pakistan‘s annual education statistics outline stark realities such as low school
enrolment and retention rates as well as inadequate resources and infrastructure,
successive governments have yet to comprehend the benefits of educating 24 million out of
school children. In Fata alone, the Directorate of Education failed to enrol some 150,000
children in primary education during a two-month campaign ending on May 31. Aimed at
essentially enrolling 400,000 out-of-school children in primary education as part of a three-
year drive in the country‘s militancy-affected northwest, the campaign‘s ineffectiveness
implies the need to overcome many challenges — poor security, lack of capacity to
implement education plans and inadequate allocation of resources.

MANY dream of transforming Pakistan into a „knowledge society‟; however, this dream will
remain unfulfilled if those sitting in the hallowed halls of academia continue to take a soft
line on plagiarism. As reported in this paper on Tuesday, the University of Karachi has failed
to launch a formal inquiry against the acting vice chancellor of the Federal Urdu University
of Arts, Science and Technology even after evidence emerged that the individual in question
had apparently plagiarised. KU had awarded the doctorate. The Higher Education
Commission has said the acting VC‟s PhD thesis, as well as many of his research papers,
contains unacknowledged material lifted from other sources. Despite these serious
allegations of academic misconduct, it is unclear why he continues to remain in charge of a
major tertiary institution. For example, he reportedly managed to get 17 research papers
published in seven months. Any serious scholar will testify that even a single research paper
takes several months of painstaking inquiry to produce. In his defence, the accused
professor said it is in fact others who have plagiarised his work.