Punjab Government Efforts

The Punjab government is striving hard to improve the standard of education especially at the primary level by providing all possible opportunities to each and every child of the province on priority basis, ignoring gender disparities. With the assistance of international donor communities, the financial assistance program is mainly focused on the uplift of primary schools. Also World Food Programme (WFP) is providing food aid to poor rural families for sending their girls to school. A novel approach i.e. free books, free education plus Rs.200 monthly stipend (not a bad sum of money in rural areas) for girl students in selected 19 districts where literacy rate is below 40 per cent has been adopted. The government’s efforts to raise literacy rates have greatly helped in uplifting the literacy rate in the province. Though conservative and patriarchal society regards school going girls as flouting religious and cultural codes of conduct, also many poor families had not only liked the idea. But the scheme helps to change the mindset to break the traditional barrier against educating women and they jumped at the opportunity. High dropout rates within levels of schooling are very disturbing features but now via current initiatives drop out challenge which once the hurdle to spell success has been brazen out. Recent figures express over 3,50000 girls are getting stipend and about 44% enrollment increase witnessed (2 millions new enrollments).