Madressah reform continues to be a major challenge. Since the state is not in a position to outrightly ban madressahs and immediately replace them with regular schools, attempts to mainstream them by encouraging them to incorporate worldly subjects are widely considered the only other alternative. However, actual enrolment trends seem to go against this conventional wisdom. Moreover, attempts to convince madressahs in Pakistan to include worldly knowledge in their curriculum have a long history,
Child Rights in Focus
SHANGLA: Two neighbours assaulted a nine-year-old boy and filmed the act in Dehrai of Alpuri tehsil here. The police have arrested the two accused. Alpuri police station SHO Mohammad Arif Khan said that the victim along with his father reported to the police on December 21 that he was returning from his aunt’s home when Nasibur Rehman called him to a shop owned by Azan Ahmad. “When I went inside the shop, both Nasib
KARACHI: A judicial magistrate on 21 December granted bail to six suspects arrested a day before in Korangi for allegedly attacking a polio team with shovels. The investigating officer of the case brought the six suspects — Amna, Iqra and Ibrahim, alias Faizan (all juvenile suspects) and Samina Khan, Mahjabeen Suleman and Gul Imran — before the judicial magistrate (East), seeking their police remand for further interrogation. The IO informed the court that they had hurt
IN 2019, when I was teaching full time, our institute collaborated with a university in Canada in their Global Reporting Programme where three of our students, along with students in Kenya and the US, were selected to work on an academic year-long project. The three students and I would log on at 9 pm on Zoom — before that became a thing — for a three-hour weekly class. That year’s theme was on how
THE campaign to eradicate polio from Pakistan cannot succeed unless the safety of vaccinators and security personnel on the front lines of this battle is guaranteed. According to one count, over 200 polio workers and police personnel have been martyred in the field since the 1990s. The latest tragedy occurred only a few days ago when a policeman guarding a polio team in KP’s Karak area was martyred. However, while militant violence forms a
Religious schools, or madrasas, have been integral to the cultural and educational landscape of the subcontinent and the broader Muslim world for centuries. At the time of the independence, around 250 madrasas existed in Pakistan. Since then, these religious institutions have experienced exponential growth, with tens of thousands of them now operating across the country. These madrasas collectively enrol millions of pupils and employ nearly 75,000 teachers. However, a significant proportion of these institutions
ISLAMABAD: A new climate-resilient school, built by ‘Save the Children’ and recently handed over to the provincial education department, has been opened, according to a statement issued by the international aid organisation on 19-December-2024. The school replaces a building that was destroyed in the 2022 floods and is designed to withstand flooding, with high ceilings and increased ventilation to keep students cool during intense heatwaves, and with solar panels to provide sustainable, uninterrupted electricity.
MANSEHRA: Students of the government primary school in Jabori area here are attending classes in the open amid intense cold due to along delay in reconstruction. The five-room multi-storey building was destroyed in a fire in June last year, according to residents. “Even one year and a half after the fire incident, both girls and boys have to study in a miserable condition without proper facilities,” Abdul Wahid Khan told reporters on 20 December
LOWER DIR: Experts at a seminar stressed the importance of mothers regularly breastfeeding their newborns for at least two years, as breastfeeding protected them from various infectious diseases. The local health department in collaboration with the Unicef and World Food Programme organised a seminar for religious scholars, media persons and community leaders at Timergara the other day to create public awareness regarding the importance of breastfeeding. District Health Officer (DHO) Dr Mohammad Nisar, Unicef’s
KARACHI: A landlord has been arrested for sexually abusing a minor daughter of his tenant within the remits of Surjani Town police station. As per details, police registered a sexual abuse case against the landlord, Babil, on the complaint of the six-year-old victim’s father Muhammad Asadullah, who is a resident of Sector 50/C, Lyari, Taisar Town. He has four children – three daughters and a son. When Asadullah and his wife would go to
KARACHI: Preparations are underway in Sindh for the introduction of e-marking in the 2025 annual matriculation and intermediate exams. Both the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK) and the Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) have finalised plans to embrace this digital assessment method, which will be applied to the exams for the current academic year. The decision follows a training workshop on e-marking held last week at the Federal Board in Islamabad. Attendees
HYDERABAD: In an unspeakably horrific manifestation of human barbarity, an anger provoked mother allegedly took the lives of her twin sons, aged three years, in Shaheed Benazirabad district on December 18. “I first slit the throat of one son and then I took my other son to another room where I strangled him before slitting his throat as well,” mother, Komal Shaikh, confessed to the police besides disclosing the same to the media on