Hearing pleas against the closure of Basic Education Community Schools and the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), the Supreme Court (SC) on Friday grilled Attorney General (AG) Moulvi Anwar-ul-Haq for not producing the detailed report over the utilisation of Rs 66 billion, collected by the federal government under the head of Iqra surcharge.
A three-member bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Justice Khilji Arif Hussain and Justice Tariq Parvez was hearing a set of petitions filed by Fiaqat Hussain and others against the closure of ‘Establishment and Operation of Basic Education Community Schools Project’ and the NCHD.
The court ordered the attorney general to submit the report without any delay and reserved its verdict over the petitions. The court also ordered the government to immediately release salaries to the teachers and staff of community schools.
The attorney general said the community schools project and the NCHD had not been dissolved, rather devolved to the provinces under the 18th Amendment. He said the provincial governments were now responsible to manage the project and the NCHD, adding that there were complaints that majority of the schools were ghost.
After the 18th Amendment, the federal government tried to pass on the community schools project to the provinces, which refused to operate it. The government then closed down the project, which operated 15,101 schools having an enrolment of 561,000 students and a workforce of 30,000 employees.
The chief justice replied that wrongdoings prevailed everywhere. He asked the attorney general to pinpoint one institution where wrongdoings did not prevail.
Due to wrongdoings, the chief justice said, institutions are not closed rather demerits and errors are removed. He asked who would be responsible for the 0.6 million children and thousands of employees if the community schools were closed down. The court said the government’s negligence had put the future of students at stake.
The petitioners claimed that the federation could not be absolved of its constitutional obligation under Article 25 (a) and 37 (b) of the constitution, which provided guarantee of education to every child between 8-16 years of age. They argued that Pakistan was expected to achieve a literacy rate of 85 percent by the year 2015, as it was a signatory to various global agreements including the Millennium Development Goals.
