Daily Times

LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has said that the only road leading to prosperity and development is education, which creates vision, quality and cognisance in country and makes people strong enough to face every difficulty.

“The Punjab government has started different progressive strides for advancement of instruction, as well as formulated a viable strategy to acquire school,” he said while attending a function at Aiwan-e-Iqbal regarding this year’s school enrolment campaign.

The CM formally inaugurated this campaign by entering names of two children in tablets and gave them books and bagpacks.

Speaking on the occasion, he vowed that the government would complete the target of bringing every child of Punjab into schools before the next election to ensure that none of the youngsters is denied the right to education.

The CM said that this campaign was being launched every year and “today we are gathered here for this purpose, as this ceremony is linked to 36 others districts of province through video link”.

He said that quality education was not only the right of elites and “I will take each conceivable move to equip the country’s children with education”.

He lamented that the elites yearned for quality education and healthcare facilities for their youngsters but when somebody purposes the same for the poor they feel “disturbed”.

“We need to change this attitude, framework and culture and let the poor enjoy the same benefits.”

He urged everyone to have their influence to end this gab between the rich and the poor from Pakistan and turn the country into a genuine welfare Islamic state as per the vision of Quaid and Iqbal.

He said that assembly members, newly elected leadership of districts, officials of the education department and students should – with passion and hard work – make this campaign fruitful.

He urged them to accept this huge challenge of ensuring that none of the children of Punjab was left out of school.

He said that success of this campaign mainly depended on the role of teachers, who were the essential element of this procedure, “so all the teachers are requested to step forward for achieving this target”.

The CM said that he had always given importance to the training of teachers because only well-trained teachers could polish their students well to compete. He said that an incredible venture in the field of education was the establishment of the Punjab Education Foundation through which 2.2 million children would be provided with quality education, while a voucher scheme of this institute had enabled talented student of less privileged families to get education.

Also, the Punjab government has outsourced 4,500 schools of remote areas, which doubled the number of students there.

He said that 80,000 teachers were being recruited this year as well, amongst whom 50 percent were females. He said there was no shortage of resources for training of teachers. “In fact, we are ready to cut short our expenses for this purpose.”