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lacked toilets, and 59.6% schools had no electricity. Moreover, 505 schools
lacked proper buildings in Punjab, 11,669 in Sindh, 1,113 in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa, 681 in Balochistan, 2,705 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, 183 in
Gilgit-Baltistan, and 908 schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Experts believed that absence of such facilities contributed to the high dropout
rate in the country.
School buildings in Pakistan were frequently employed as polling stations,
relief camps in times of natural disasters and even police stations. In FATA,
the military was also reported to have used them as camps. In addition to such
disruption of education, the government reportedly engaged public school
teachers in non-academic activities, robbing them of the time to concentrate
on lesson planning and classroom management. Teachers were reportedly
also engaged in anti-polio campaigns, sugar distribution monitoring, voters’
list compilation and political meetings of top government functionaries.
Reports of occupation of educational premises by government officials
also made the news in 2012. In one case before the Supreme Court, the
Abbottabad district administration was ordered to ensure that police vacated
an illegally occupied girls’ school. A girls’ hostel of the Rawalpindi Medical
College remained illegally occupied by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB)
for many years and despite the Prime Minister’s intervention it had not been
vacated.
Corporal punishment leading to broken limbs and even suicide by students
was frequently reported
in 2012. Even though the
government had
prohibited corporal
punishment at schools
through the Prohibition
of Corporal Punishment
Act, the violent practice
continued and was seen
as one of the reasons for
a steep dropout rate in
the country. [See also the
chapter ‘Children’]
According to an
education officer from
Bajaur Agency,
enrolment increased in
2012 with 39,000 new
students enrolling in
schools. The increase
A happy madrassah student.
225
State of Human Rights in 2012