KARACHI – While the federal and provincial governments play ping-pong over jurisdictions, almost a year after the 18th Amendment, which denotes education between the ages of six and 16 a right rather than a privilege, received presidential assent, no notifications have been issued to cancel fees for government schools. “Why should we be made to pay if education is a right,” Haleem, whose children, seven-year-old Saba and eight-year-old Wahab, attend a government school in Malir, said. “I earn Rs 4,000 per month, out of which I have to pay rent and manage groceries. I send my children to school because I don’t want them to end up like me. I pay Rs 125 per month for each of them. Rs 250 are a huge amount for me, and if the government claims that education is not a ‘privilege’, it should cancel these fees.”
Other parents in the mohalla, near the Malir phaattak, agreed. Most of the women stay at home, while most men there are daily-wage labourers. Others work at factories, where hardly any of them get the government-sanctioned minimum wage of Rs 6,500. Almost all of them are Pakhtun. “We came here to look for better work. We found that, but none of it pays too much, you know. Most of us are barely literate,” 31-year-old Asghar, who has three sons between the ages of five and 11, said. “We don’t want our children to face the same thing, so we make sure that they go to school. Government schools won’t teach them much, but they’ll at least have some hope of getting out of here.”
“I’m lucky in that I have only two children,” Haleem maintained. “Others have more; how can they pay the fees for all of them? This is one major reason why many girls from this mohalla end up not going to school. If I had more children, I would probably also have chosen to only educate my sons. It is not a choice I would have liked to make, but my options are limited, financially. Rs 250 per month means that I’ve spent around Rs 2,750 on school fees alone between April last year and now. Imagine the amount of money I would have saved if ‘these people’ had sorted out their issues on time.”
Other parents from the area claimed that if primary and secondary education were free, as per the 18th Amendment, all the children in the area would go to school. The provincial government, meanwhile, has not issued any notification cancelling fees for government schools. “Cancelling fees is on the cards, but we are waiting for the federal government to hand over the matter of education to the provinces,” sources in education department said. “The issue is almost resolved, and we are expecting a permanent solution by the end of April. Let’s hope for some positive news in this regard by mid-2011.”
