A Pakistani education success story looks for Indian partners

NEW DELHI - In Pakistan, a success story in education has been quietly running for the last decade - and is now looking for Indian partners in e-learning and book publishing.

With a literacy rate of 54 percent and a deteriorating public school system, a group of friends in Pakistan started the Citizens Foundation, a voluntary group which now runs over 650 schools across the country.

“We want to explore opportunities with India in e-learning, which we want to start in our schools,” said Syed Asad Ayub Ahmad, chief executive officer of the Citizens Foundation, at a two-day business meet here Tuesday on India-Pakistan trade relations.

He also listed book publishing as another area for cooperation, as India has a more developed publishing industry.

The foundation is running 660 schools, which has enrolment of 92,000 students, being taught by 4,800 teachers. All the schools are run in economically backward areas, but Ahmad pointed out that these were certainly not “poor schools for the poor”.

He showed slides of multi-storeyed schools, colourful classrooms and happy, active students. The foundation not only builds its own schools, but also owns a large fleet of 600 vans to transport teachers to the schools.

While the cost of teaching each student was around 1,000 Pakistani rupees a month, the actual fees depended on the ability of the parents to pay. “So, it can range from Rs.10 to a maximum of Rs. 200, which means a subsidy of over 90 percent,” he said.

Not that it has always been easy to set up the schools, which are often seen as a threat to the entrenched power system. “In some places, the local maulvi or local badmash (criminal) often creates problems. In one instance, when the morning prayer started in school, the maulvi would start chanting through the loudspeaker,” he said.

Ahmad said that the management of such large number of schools has largely been “perfected” through “trial and error”. “We will be glad to work with Indian voluntary groups who would like to replicate this here,” he said.