Daily Times

This year again, as school exams begin in Sindh, cheating during papers has taken hold. Teachers who look after the exams as invigilators actually do the cheating: they look the other way as students take out their notes and copy answers supplied them beforehand. They allow cellphones into the examination hall despite prohibition and the examinees pick up the answers from WhatsApp. If the rare honest examiner queers the pitch, the Sindh Teachers Association takes action against him. What is the secret of the immoral power of the teachers most of whom are illiterate and have been inducted on bribes? We owe this to the ministers of education who line their pockets by destroying the future of Sindh.

Last year 23 officials of Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) were involved in facilitating cheating. They, along with “private chat” mafia agents, organized “paper leaks” and “social media assistance” during exams. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah ordered an inquiry into the matter, and we don’t know what he did with it later, but this year too cheating is rampant as Sindh observes the Day of Martyrdom of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the party in power in the province. Students who spoke to the TV channels said their future was doomed if they didn’t cheat. And if they did then Pakistan is doomed.

In 2017, the Sindh Education Minister Jam Mehtab Dahar admitted that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had been at the center of corruption in the hiring of teachers in the province. The training institutes of the province inform that almost half of the schoolteachers inducted through bribes are “un-trainable”; in other words, illiterate. But, drawing salaries without going to the job, these teachers have become a powerful street force, and no one wants to take them on. Pakistan suffered immensely by neglecting the Tribal Areas; it is doomed because of what it is nursing in the shape of primary and secondary education in Sindh.

Published in Daily Times, April 7^th 2018.