LARKANA: Government Middle School of village Mubarak Jeho in Ratodero Taluka has been converted into a vegetable field since last eight years as it was never made operational.
Due to non-availability of middle section, the school’s hundreds of male and female students have either to abandon their further education after primary or have to travel to Mirpur Bhutto, Dakhan, Madeji, Ratodero and Naundero to get education. This scribe visited the affected school on Wednesday on receipt of complaints by the villagers and found it ruined.
The school consists of five classrooms costing millions of rupees. The landlord has sown vegetables around the school. Tariq Jeho and others said that male and female students of about 10 nearby villages had been forced to go to other schools to get higher education. He said his father Ghulam Akbar Jeho gave the plot for the school amid their fertile agricultural land so that kids could be educated.
He said that Deh Mubarak Jeho was previously included in Shikarpur district and the school was constructed at that time and when the school was ready to function, Deh Mubarak Jeho was returned back to Larkana district and since then, this school has never been made functional by the education department bosses despite our repeated written requests.
He said that officers further told them that the school was constructed by Shikarpur administration and now it should have been run by them as well. He said that for this dispute children of many adjacent villages are being punished and their future is at stake. He said that children have to travel daily between 12 to 15 kilometers on rickshaws.
Junaid Dahar of an NGO striving for improving education in the country said that 60 middle schools out of 80 in Larkana district are completely non-operational due to the sheer negligence of school and district managements. He said these schools were built for landlords of the villages to use them as Otaqs not for imparting education purposes. He said that neither SNEs of those schools were approved not teachers were posted.