You
Tue, 07, 21
Despite a 72 per cent literacy rate in Gilgit-Baltistan, many children in these towns don’t have access to good books. This week You! takes a look at the reading culture in the region…
Book lovers and readers often attribute their reading passion to parents who read them bedtime stories, teachers who affectionately added storytelling to their lessons, reading competitions at school and access to libraries and books in their growing years. However, we don’t realise that this is a huge privilege, as in cities like Gilgit and Hunza, many children in these towns don’t have access to the kind of books we did in our growing years. And so, in the absence of well stocked libraries and bookstores with wide collections, any development initiative to encourage children to read and build a love for learning, reading and storytelling in them, is a remarkable effort.
Zubeida Mustafa
A HEFTY sum of over a trillion rupees has been earmarked for education collectively in the federal and provincial budgets for 2021-2022 that were announced in June. This amount has been growing over the years. But this massive financial investment in human resources has not produced the impact that could have rationally been expected on the learning outcomes of children in Pakistan. This has been confirmed year after year by Aser (Annual Status of Education Report).
Aser 2021 released recently has also recorded the learning losses suffered during the pandemic lockdown. Its key finding is shocking. In 2019, 22 per cent of Grade 3 children had managed to work out two-digit division sums. This percentage dropped to 12 this year.
Zubeida Mustafa
RECENTLY I received a call from Ali Mohammad Goth (in Jahoo Tehsil, population 40,033) in Awaran, Balochistan. Jahoo Tehsil has only two high schools for girls. Scores of students from one of these schools had demanded books to read. This message was conveyed to me by their headmistress Ms Sabar-un-Nisa, courtesy Shabir Rakhshani, the education activist of Awaran. This made me jump up.
Ever since I started writing about book publishing in Pakistan 40 years ago, I have been told by representatives that Pakistanis do not like to read. This has been confirmed by my own sources. That has conventionally been advanced as the reason for the underdevelopment of the publishing industry. In 2019, a survey conducted by Gallup and Gilani, an affiliate of Gallup International, released the report of their survey on reading habits. It claimed that 75 per cent of respondents said they do not read books at all. The 25pc who read included those reading course books, religious litera
Zubeida Mustafa
AT the Pakistan Learning Festival, the session on ‘Incredible Libraries’ attracted many bibliophiles. It is a paradox that in this age of ‘un-education’ in Pakistan a discourse on libraries should win a prized spot. The credit for this goes to the sponsors of the festival, the Idara-i-Taaleem-o-Agahi that has always regarded libraries as an important source of learning.
It was a great idea to showcase some extraordinary libraries that are real treasures in terms of their ingenuity and the inspiration they provide to young readers who are otherwise deprived of their basic right to education.
Study the principles that underpin the Alif Laila Bus Book Library (Lahore), the Kitab Garri, a rickshaw-library (Lahore), the Oont Library on a camel (Mand, Balochistan) and the Digi Kutubkhana in a steel trunk (Mubarak Village, Sindh). They owe their creation to innovative ideas. Their success belies the commonly held belief that big and expensive structures filled wit