K-P is abandoning children

Express Tribune

2 days ago

The writer is a Lecturer in English at the Higher Education Department, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Email him at [e-mail]
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Let's call it what it is: K-P is abandoning its children. Not metaphorically, not in the way people toss around, 'Oh, the system is broken.' No. The system isn't broken; it's functioning exactly as it's allowed to, with chilling indifference to the rights of the most vulnerable.
A recent report by the provincial Education Department pulls no punches. Legions of children enrolled in over 10,000 public schools across K-P arrive each day at buildings as bare as unfinished construction sites. No boundary walls. No electricity. No washrooms. Not even drinking water.
Over 5,000 schools in K-P operate without a single watt of electricity. In more than 2,000 schools, safe drinking water is a rarity. Thousands more lack washrooms or a protective wall around them. In Peshawar — the provincial capital itself — 21 schools are in the dark, 15 can't offer clean water, 17 lack even a toilet and eight stand exposed, wall-less, to the city's sprawl. Peshawar, not some remote hillside village!
Think about that for a second. We send our children off to elite schools in cars, armed with water bottles, packed lunches and backpacks stuffed with textbooks. Meanwhile, countless children in this country walk into schools that don't even have a toilet. Is this the dignity we promise every child under the Constitution?
Yet, millions don't even get this indignity because they never enter a school at all. Thirty-seven per cent of children in K-P are out of school altogether. That's millions of futures we're snuffing out before they even begin. Nearly eight out of every 10 children in Lower and Upper Kohistan never even make it into a classroom. In Peshawar alone, over half a million are out of school — of those, 319,000 are girls. It's not a gender gap anymore; it's a gulf.
And if you thought the ones lucky enough to be enrolled were at least getting a decent education, think again. Because unable to fund enough textbooks, the province now prints half and asks schools to source the rest from promotees, turning scarcity into strategy.
The hand-me-down model might sound thrifty, but in practice, it's a debacle. Most old books either fall apart, go missing or are defaced with scribbles, tears and tea stains. And let's be honest: a lot of students just don't return them. So expecting this to work as a long-term plan isn't just lazy or absurd; it's negligent!
What all this adds up to is a blatant violation of Article 25-A of the Constitution which guarantees every child the right to free and compulsory education. It also tramples all over the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Free Compulsory Primary and Secondary Education Act, 2017. Laws on paper, like fire alarms in buildings no one checks.
Turning this around requires the provincial government to act decisively across several fronts.
First, it needs to stop pretending its job is done at enrolment. Children need functioning schools, not just roll numbers. Fixing basic infrastructure — electricity, toilets, clean water, boundary walls — isn't some high-minded reform; it's the minimum standard of decency.
Second, launch a real plan - not just window dressing - to bring out-of-school children (OOSC) into the system. This must include targeted efforts in high-need areas like Kohistan — even Peshawar — and the tribal districts, especially for girls left behind in droves.
Third, stop slashing textbook budgets and start facing reality. If the government wants students to reuse books, it must put in place a real system to collect and track them. Or better yet, fund a full print run, because this isn't where we should be paisa-pinching.
This isn't a resource issue; it's a priority issue. And so far, our priorities are glaringly apparent in every broken classroom, every empty desk and every torn-up textbook.
K-P is failing its children. And if this doesn't set off alarms, maybe we've failed too. Because at the very least, K-P's children deserve better. That shouldn't be a radical thing to say.