Lahore:
About 10 million children in Punjab are outside the school, an information sheet published by a non -profit organization has revealed, urging the provincial government to create educational opportunities.
The report published by Population Council cited the shortage of facilities, infrastructure, inflation and unemployment as the main reasons for a high abandonment ratio of school children.
He stressed that 19,000 additional schools were necessary in the province by 2040 to respond to millions of children in the future.
The educators said that there was a terrible need for the government to supervise a strategy to control population growth and meet its needs in the future.
At a time when the Punjab government was engaged in the outsourcing and privatization of public sector schools, the last report published by the Population Council stressed that the number of children outside the school was alarming.
The report of the first quarter of the current year in progress highlighted the last situation concerning the population of the provinces and its impact on the related sectors, in particular education.
He highlighted the student abandonment ratio, the lack of infrastructure and the shortage of public schools in Punjab.
According to the facts and figures shared in the report, the percentage of the girls of the school aged five to 16 is higher than the boys. Data has shown that 28% of girls in the age group are outside schools, while the percentage of boys is 26 years.
The information sheet has revealed that there are 25 million children outside the school in the country, including 10 million areas in Punjab, eight million in Sindh, five million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and three million in Balutchistan.
He has shown that 57,000 additional public sector schools are required to educate all children across the country, including 19,000 in Punjab, 5,700 in Balutchistan, 19,000 in Sindh and 12,000 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa by 2040.
The information sheet also indicated that after increasing the Punjab population, it is also necessary to create job possibilities for young people.
It is necessary to create 59 million new jobs for young people by 2040, he added.
The Director of the Population Council, Ali Mazhar, said: “A rapidly growing population means that increasingly important demands of jobs, educational establishments, health establishments and infrastructure, and it is necessary to consider the challenges and prepare to counter them.”
A leader of a teacher union, Rana Liaqat Ali, said that Punjab teachers had protested the privatization of public schools since last year.
He said that the teachers opposed this decision, because it would lead to an increase in the abandonment ratio because the poor could not afford an expensive education.
He said that international organizations and population experts call for more schools, but local decision -makers outsource institutions, leaving fewer options to financial resources to educate their children.
The main director of the Population Council, Dr. Ali Mir, said that enormous demographic growth was a great obstacle in the country’s progress and that the government was playing its role to meet future challenges.
“In particular, challenges in the fields of health, education, jobs and infrastructure will be serious in the future and it is necessary that our political decision-makers understand the situation and take on timely measures,” he added.
