The Directorate of Colleges Education Sindh has issued new admission policy for intermediate with new and complex conditions that have created difficulties for nearly 1.5 million students. Under the new and complex policy, in addition to the student’s own domicile, the admission process will now also require the parent’s domicile and the student’s certificate of middle-school and primary education.
The Sindh government’s new policy on admission has elicited both positive and negative responses. The encouraging thing in the policy is that it will help stop college admissions on the basis of fake domicile. However, the condition to submit primary school certificate would make students and their guardians run around.
These points have been included in the Central Admission Policy for the first time. It has also been revealed that if a student fails to furnish the aforementioned documents, he or she will not be able to enroll in the Intermediate Board.
Meanwhile, the Sindh education department has also increased the number of seats at the intermediate level by 20,000 bringing the total number of seats to 1,40,000 to accommodate new entrants. There is already a shortage of teachers in Sindh’s colleges and they lack buildings, classrooms, labs, and basic facilities. How will then they accommodate large numbers of students?
Studies have already suffered due to the coronavirus pandemic, even though most students have been enabled to pass secondary school examination under a lenient policy. Annual Status of Education report has put the education system of Sindh at the very bottom due to underlying structural flaws.
To begin with, it illustrates that 56.2% of children in grade 5 cannot read a story in any national language while 69.5% cannot solve basic mathematics problems. However, what is most worrisome is the fact that a staggering 6.5 million children are currently out of school in the province.
In such a situation, introducing such complex policy would further trouble the students and their parents. It is true that the crisis of education has further been exacerbated by the pandemic, but the province can overcome the crisis by taking serious efforts and introducing meaningful reforms.
