Gaps - Page 4

Federal Health Minister Urges Action As Vaccination Refusals Hindering Polio Eradication

Federal Health Minister Syed Mustafa Kamal has expressed serious concern over vaccine refusals, stating that nearly 43,000 parents in Sindh — 42,000 of them in Karachi alone —have refused polio vaccination for their children, posing a major obstacle to the eradication efforts. He made these remarks while visiting the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre for Polio (EOC) in Sindh to assess…

Birth Registration Of Girls Remains Low

Majority of women and girls have no legal existence in the official systems PESHAWAR: Where limited access to registration centers, particularly in remote and underserved areas, can partly explain the low birth registration rate for girls in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the social bias that confines women to the four walls of the…

Father Tells Heartbreaking Story Of Losing Two Children In Swat Tragedy

MARDAN: A man from Mardan recounted the tragic incident at the Swat…

CII To Deliberate On Mothers Milk Registry Today

ISLAMABAD: Senior child specialists from the Sindh Institute of Child Health and…

Educating the Poor

JAVED is enrolled in Grade 6 in a government school in his village. Akhtar, Javed’s father, is wondering whether or not he should pull Javed out of school. Akhtar feels Javed is not learning much at school, and that if he is put to work at the nearby auto-repair workshop…

Kotli Seminary Incident Exposes Gaps in Oversight, Child Protection

MUZAFFARABAD: The alleged sexual assault and death of a young seminary student in Kotli district of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) has exposed serious gaps in oversight and child protection mechanisms in religious institutions in the region, with police acknowledging that similar incidents often go unreported or fail to reach…

Education Last

THERE is one question that has been bothering me these days: what message are we sending to our children when their education is the first thing we suspend in times of crisis? We are a country with 26.2 million children out of school, according to data collected in 2021–22 by…

Chaos Persists as Schools, Students Struggle to Secure Matric Admit Cards in Karachi

KARACHI: A day after the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK) postponed the matriculation exams for three days, the administrations of hundreds of schools, mostly privately run, are still scrambling to obtain admit cards for their thousands of students so they can learn about their examination centres. The matriculation exams, originally scheduled…

Private Schools’ Associations all to Postpone Matric Exams Amid Admit Card Chaos in Sindh

KARACHI: The Grand Alliance of Private Schools Associations in Sindh on Sunday called to postpone the matriculation exams by a week due to incomplete and flawed arrangements, with thousands of students still without their admit cards. Examinations for the 10th grade are scheduled to begin on Tuesday, and for the 9th grade…

Rains Wreak Havoc Countrywide

ISLAMABAD/KARACHI/QUETTA/PESHAWAR: Torrential rain and severe weather swept across Pakistan on April 2, leaving devastation in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), killing more than a dozen people and disrupting daily life. In Karachi, at least six people lost their lives, mostly due to electrocution, as heavy rain and strong winds inundated…

Open Manholes Still a Menace for Lahore Residents

LAHORE: The Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) of Lahore continues to ignore the dangers posed by open manholes and yet to learn from various accidents, including the recent incident at the Bhaati Chowk remodeling project, as many manhole covers remain missing in various parts of the city. “For the last…

Gender Disparity Persists in Education

DIR UPPER/QUETTA: In the rugged terrain of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Dir Upper district, the promise of equal educational opportunities for girls remains largely unfulfilled even in 2026. Official records reveal a glaring imbalance: while girls constitute more than half the population, educational facilities for female students lag significantly behind those for boys,…

Selling Newborns

Human life should never be a commodity. Yet across the country, networks exist that buy and sell newborn babies, exploiting women driven into secrecy and desperation. A recent raid in Sheikham near Sarai Mughal, located in Kasur district of Punjab, uncovered a clinic that allegedly handled deliveries of vulnerable women…

Students Threaten Protest against Kohat Education Board

KOHAT: Around 4,000 students from Kohat, Karak, Hangu, Teerah, Shakardarra and Darra Adamkhel, who have changed schools, have accused the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Kohat, of not allowing them to sit their 9th and 10th grade exams in their new institutions. In a statement issued here, they stated…