LAHORE: The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) Wednesday hailed the donation of busses to the educational institutes in the capital by the Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif under the PM Education Reforms Program and termed it a great favor to the students who are future of Pakistan. There is a dire need to provide mass transit system to all schools.
In a statement issued here, the LCCI President Abdul Basit and Vice President Muhammad Nasir Hameed Khan said that this measure shows that government wants to ensure children are provided with all latest facilities and good environment for education.
The LCCI office-bearers said that hats off for the present regime in general and Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif in particular for doing this as children are the future of Pakistan and precious asset.
They said that same courage should be shown by the provincial governments. They said that though Punjab government is doing a lot to promote education among the poor but still a lot has to be done as a large part of society has not access to the education or the basic facilities at the government schools. They said that federal government should take such initiatives for the students across the country while provincial government should ensure provision of all necessities in the government schools.
They said that education is to be the force of development plan. The expense on education has hardly ever crossed 3 % percent of GDP despite the fact that no development plan can proceed further without raising this figure to 6% percent. They said that it must be top agenda item for the federal and provincial government.
“Approximately, Pakistan has around 6.8 million children that are out of school, showing the extreme dearth of primary schooling and enrollment. Student teacher ratio is 40:1 as compared to Sri Lanka where 24 students have one teacher. Sri Lanka has a literacy rate of around 99% showing higher number of teachers a sign of preparedness for eradicating illiteracy. For 6.9 million students who have no teacher, we need to create 170,000 more jobs for teachers at current rate if we were to fully educate our children. During the year 2030, our need will be to create over 2.63 lakh new jobs of teachers for 10.5 million children that will be outside the school at primary level”, the LCCI office-bearers added.
They said that government needs to invest more in the education sector and facilitate the lower and middle classes students to create gigantic human resource that could change the faith of country besides bringing in precious foreign exchange through their abilities.
The LCCI office-bearers further said that higher education must be more technical and instead of sending our students abroad and spending our foreign exchange in foreign education, local facilities in technical institutes must be established. They said that the higher education commission must bring foreign teacher in technical areas from abroad to educate our students rather than spending fortunes of hard earned money on spending our students abroad who rarely return.
