The Inter Provincial Education Ministers Committee (IPEMC) unanimously decided to hold examinations after June 20, hence the announcement in that regard would be made by the concerned provinces. The 29th IPEMC’s meeting was held under the chairmanship of Federal Minister for Education and Training Shafqat Mahmood. The meeting was participated by all stakeholders including Education Ministers and Secretaries of AJ&K and Gilgit Baltistan. IPEMC Chairman Shafqat Mahmood stressed all federating units to ensure timely vaccination of teachers, monitoring and other managing staff and those who do not have vaccination certificate would not be called for invigilation duties during examinations. Shafqat Mahmood and his IPEMC had been engaged in playing a hide and catch game with Students across the Country during more than a year of coronavirus pandemic. The IPEMC’s intermittent / back and forth decisions had badly hampered the Students educational activities particularly career of the kids studying in board classes or preparing for admission in professional colleges. Most of the private Schools has tackled the issue through alternate resources such as online classes on zoom or video calls etc. But the students of government Schools suffered a lot because they were not provided with any alternate arrangements by the government in absence of face to face classes. However, we opined on these pages few months back that government must open regional TV Channels to facilitate the Students of government School to hold online distant classes through Television. In fact, Shafqat Mahmood and his team did not pay any heed to such suggestions and remained limited to announcements of School’s opening and closures during last one years instead of making a strategy to coup up the problem. If we talk about the government schools, they did not cover even a single quarter of their annual syllabus, so what would be their examination for? The nation must ask from Shafqat Mahmood and his team what did they do for education sector during Covid-19 pandemic other than meeting sessions. However, after wasting one full educational year of the children, IPEMC is heading to conduct exams, without preparing for next educational year while living in the pandemic.
