More than 50% of Sindh’s population remains illiterate; 7 million children are out of school; and 50,000 schools lack basic facilities.
- In 70% of schools there is no electricity; children from poor families sit in classrooms in scorching heat of 45–50°C. Ninety percent of schools have no clean drinking water.
By Majid Maqsood
Just four years ago, one could easily find many articles in Sindhi and English newspapers on the state of education in Sindh. Friends and fellow writers had produced remarkable pieces on the subject. I, too, learned much about writing by reading those works, and after spending considerable time working in the education sector, I began to understand how education in Sindh was being systematically destroyed.
For the last four years, the Ministry of Education in Sindh has been headed by the eminent writer and poet Sardar Shah. Since then, no prominent writer has bothered to address the issue of education’s decline. Some have praised certain of his initiatives on social media, but none have uttered a single word about the continuing deterioration of the sector.
Some believe that if the Ministry of Education had been headed by another PPP leader, these very same friends would have written critically. But they cannot bring themselves to write against Sardar Shah’s tenure. This is not merely conjecture — there is evidence that the Pakistan People’s Party has adopted a highly effective strategy: buying the silence of Sindh’s intellectuals.
Because of the already low literacy rate in Sindh, the number of educated people is limited, and many of them have left the province to settle elsewhere. Those who remain include only a handful who contribute articles to newspapers. Our university professors and lecturers, owing to their government jobs, avoid writing critically; those who do write, tend to choose safe topics, ensuring they do not offend the authorities.
More significant than the ministry’s own performance is the way it has exposed the intellectual class of Sindh, revealing the culpable silence of poets and writers in the face of education’s collapse.
During his tenure, Sardar Shah also held the portfolio of Culture, launching a new era of public festivals across Sindh. By giving roles to prominent writers, journalists, and trendsetters in these events — often with payments or perks — he effectively ensured their silence. Some journalists were also included. In city after city, famous poets and writers were invited to such festivals, handed cheques, and sent home in silence. Others who work with international organizations may not need the money, but the government offers them audiences in the thousands to showcase their work. The Sindhi Adabi Board and the Sindh Textbook Board also award lucrative printing contracts to selected writers and journalists, keeping them content and compliant.
The outcome is dire: more than 50% of Sindh’s population remains illiterate; 7 million children are out of school; and 50,000 schools lack basic facilities. In 70% of schools there is no electricity; children from poor families sit in classrooms in scorching heat of 45–50°C. Ninety percent of schools have no clean drinking water.
Recently, former Secretary Naheed Shah revealed in a webinar hosted by Iqbal Tareen that in one school, the lack of a functional toilet meant that girls simply stopped attending. Only 15% of schools in Sindh offer education beyond primary level, leaving a huge number of children with no place to study after primary school.
Survey reports reveal that 80% of Grade 5 students cannot read a sentence from a Grade 2 Sindhi textbook, while 90% cannot perform basic multiplication or division. In 90% of higher secondary schools, there are no subject specialists for Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, or Computer Science. In 80% of high and higher secondary schools, there are neither libraries nor laboratories.
In 2024, some two million children did not receive textbooks — a fact admitted in court by former Secretary Akbar Laghari. Such conditions did not exist even during the tenure of former Education Minister Abdul Salam Thaheem, who had no formal education, yet the situation today under this celebrated “literary” minister is far worse.
Let us briefly examine Sardar Shah’s performance and his policy announcements.
In the last PPP government, upon becoming minister, he announced the creation of a complaint center at the Sindh Secretariat to resolve public grievances. That center has still not been established. He later declared that district officers and directors in the education department would be hired through the Public Service Commission — a promise still unfulfilled. He made a major announcement that teachers in private schools would be paid at least as much as government teachers, yet today most private school teachers still earn only Rs.10,000–15,000 a month. Even in government-supported Sindh Education Foundation schools, 70% of teachers earn Rs.10,000, with a maximum of Rs.20000 — hardly enough to ensure quality teaching.
He also declared that all private schools must teach Sindhi and that any failing to do so would have their licenses revoked. Not a single school has had its license cancelled. More recently, the minister claimed that there are no teachers available in cities to teach Sindhi — a statement that is patently false, given that Karachi alone has thousands of qualified Sindhi-speaking young men and women. The truth is that private schools simply do not want to offer Sindhi.
Not once has the minister announced plans to urgently provide basic facilities to schools. My own experience with the budget and procurement process for furniture was eye-opening: in one region, half the items on the furniture list were removed, and departmental officers negotiated with contractors for a 30–40% cut. Funds allocated for furniture were returned unspent, with only token purchases made, and no one held accountable.
The minister also announced that music teachers would be appointed in schools — an idea praised by intellectuals as a revolutionary step. But where would they teach? No school has a dedicated music room. Some teachers were issued offer letters, but to date, no posting orders have been given. The same is true for AC classroom teachers hired in 2018 — we are now in 2025, yet no AC classrooms exist for them to teach in.
These are the kinds of initiatives schools truly need — basic facilities, proper classrooms, and dedicated spaces for new subjects — but the minister has shown no real intent to address them. Instead, he is preoccupied with licensing teachers, a process that requires a B.Ed degree. However, 90% of the 95,000 newly appointed teachers do not hold one. The result will be that those with fake, purchased degrees will advance, while engineers and professionals who became teachers — and from whom the minister had high expectations — will fall behind.
Just yesterday, speaking to the media, the minister said teachers need training and that he had asked his close friend Ishaq Samejo to open a training center for them — despite the fact that excellent government institutions like PITE and STEVTA already exist for teacher training.
Sindh’s education budget for this year stands at Rs. 613 billion, with Rs. 89 billion allocated for development. Yet there is little hope that by 2026 schools will see basic facilities restored or any real change on the ground.
Read: Deterioration of Education in Sindh
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Writer is based in Mirpurkhas, Sindh
