The Foundation for Rehabilitation and Education of Slow Children (FRESH) General Secretary Ashba Kamran criticised the distribution of laptops among students and advised the Punjab chief minister to focus on improving the education system rather than on political point-scoring. She said: “The Punjab government will spend Rs5 billion on providing laptops to students, which is a sheer wastage of public money. “The poor state of public schools has resulted in abnormal dropout rates and a high ratio of students failing at the primary and secondary level. Some 70 percent students drop out at the primary level annually and 50 percent failed the recent matriculation examination.”
She said about five million students of 1000 public sector schools would benefit if the Punjab government spent the money on them instead of purchasing 100,000 laptops at Rs50,000 each. “The Punjab government has already wasted billions of rupees in implementing the Sasti Roti scheme while contributing little to overcoming inflation. Not only this, the Punjab government’s plan to automate the Punjab Education Board has proven to be a complete failure,” she added.
‘What are you distributing the laptops for?’
