The provincial cabinet on Thursday allowed recruitment of teachers from grade 9 to 15 on contract basis. In a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Jam Kamal amendments related to new hiring in educational department were approved.

The cabinet was informed that the test and interviews for new recruitments would be done through testing services while district recruitment committees would be established to hire new teachers at district level. The education department was directed to implement the suggestions for new hiring while the cabinet agreed to follow testing criteria for other recruitments as well.

The Provincial government has also made an effort to bring in more qualified teachers.  Despite earnest attempts to fix what it sees as a flawed system, the provincial government’s battle against entrenched nepotism and a basic lack of infrastructure will be laborious and difficult, rendering the process to find and train good teachers equally fraught. But the first steps have been taken, and Balochistan is definitely on its way.

The teacher is said to be the main player in the classroom on whose delivery and use of educational material rests the quality of learning. If the teacher is not professionally qualified to teach with a base in educational know-how, standards of education will not improve as expressly desired.

Balochistan, though the largest province area – wise and the richest in resources, is the poorest and the most backward province in all aspects, particularly in the educational field and is still being ignored. According to Pakistan Education Statistics 2016-17”, At least 70% of children, between the ages of five and 16, in Balochistan do not go to school. In numbers More than 1.9 Million children including 927,542 male and 984,128 female are out of schools in Balochistan out of 2.7 million.

Balochistan has spent over 85% of the total budget allocated for education every year since 2013.  “A total of 56 billion rupees are allocated for education sector in 2018-19 Annual Budget of Balochistan including 43.9 billion rupees for schools and 8.5 billion for higher education. Major share of the budget which is around 47 billion rupees is to be spent on non-development sector. On the other hand 9 billion rupees are allocated for development projects including 1.52 rupees for ongoing schemes.

On contrary, having no such body is one of the reasons for our weak educational system that the teachers having no nowledge of the subject get a job in schools that are operating without any standard procedural code. This system of recruiting teachers should be ended and a new system to recruit teachers should be introduced.

Balochistan government has allocated more than 7 Billion rupees for the development of education sector and insisted that these measures will help to overcome the alarming numbers of out of school children.

Balochistan Government wants to provide more jobs to the youth of Balochistan, but non-merit appointments causing major blowback in further hiring. The people of Balochistan are now quite familiar with the word ‘emergency’ that echoes from the power corridors off and on. The outgoing government had also played with the word quite too long to impose so-called emergency in the education.

The provincial government needs an overhaul of the public school system and although it has begun this in some regions of the country such as the crackdown on ghost teachers, expedited action is needed.

A system of checks and balances needs to be applied because while private schools have offered some benefit, many continue to operate unethically.

Balochistan government should introduce new reforms such as biometric verification, merit-based recruitment of teachers, and standardised testing of students.