KARACHI: Despite lapse of 45 years and appointment of more than 80,000 teachers the Sindhi language could not be made effective medium of instruction, particularly for non-Sindhi students, in the province mainly due to non serious attitude of the concern departments.
Sindhi assembly had passed resolution back in 1972 making Sindhi language compulsory subject. However, only superficial steps were taken to enforce the subject in all schools across the province which proved only formal introduction to the language resultantly majority of the non-Sindhi students, enrolled in both private and public schools, couldn’t even speak basic Sindhi.
“Education and Literacy Department had deployed more than 80 thousand Sindhi Language Teachers (SLTs) across Sindh but they could not achieve the goal of making Sindhi effective tool of communication among students”, Anees-ur-Rehman, Chairman of Taleem Bachao Action Committee said adding that the decisions like this were purely political and Sindh government has not taken genuine measures to make it medium of learning as a regional language.
So far the Sindh Text Book Board has not offered effective courses and curriculum for teaching Sindhi language to develop students’ reading, writing, understanding and communication abilities.
Sindhi is being taught, in all public and private schools across the province, as a compulsory subject from grade 1 to grade 8.
However, some of the private schooling systems were not abiding by the law till last year therefore government made mandatory teaching of the Sindhi language in all the private schools in 2015 and strict instruction were issued including cancellation of registration in case of violation. However, this latest move also failed to yield any tangible results.
Anees-ur-Rehman said that offering Sindhi as compulsory subject in the schools is not enough, it should be declared medium of education at schools but students should be allowed to choose their subjects and medium what they want to learn because subject choice is a fundamental right of each student.
“The non-Sindhi students read Sindhi language just to pass their exams because they commonly communicate in mother tongue at home and in the community they belong to”, Dr Ejaz Ahmed, professor of linguistics and educationist said adding that there is a necessary precondition for education, whether those are private or public schools, students should be engaged in their mother language.
“We have set up Sindhi medium schools in urban and rural areas which provide quality education to each students but people are not interested to teach their children in those schools”, Hamid Karim, Deputy Director Schools commented. Sindhi is the major language of Sindh province and it must to be taught in schools as per provincial law.
It is worthwhile mentioning here that there are 3,685 registered private schools in Karachi, in which 11,685 SLTs are employed but their monthly salaries are extremely low, in some cases not more than Rs 2000, which shows “seriousness” of the concerned authorities. The owners of those private schools are just fulfilling the registration-related formalities as they are also not interested to teach Sindhi at schools.
According to the data of Schools Education Department 44,000 primary, secondary, and higher secondary government run schools exist in the province. While number of the private schools stands at around 35,000 across the Sindh province.