PUNJAB Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz on Tuesday approved strategies that will surely contribute a lot in improving the quality of education and provision of safe drinking water to people of the province. She approved the establishment of Aitchison-standard schools for boys and girls across the province and directed deputy commissioners of all districts to identify areas with unsafe drinking water and submit reports as the provincial government reviewed measures to restore and expand access to clean drinking water to people.
Aitchison College maintains world-class educational standards by seamlessly blending modern Cambridge and national curricula with mandatory character building. It has a long-standing tradition of producing leaders who shape Pakistan across diverse sectors. However, there is an impression and justifiably so that the institution has served the elite only because of limited enrolment capacity and comparatively higher fee structure. In this backdrop, one hopes the schools envisaged by the CM would serve the disadvantaged segments of the society to give chance to their talented children to grow and prosper and become candidates for leadership roles. The pilot project named after the CM is planned for Lahore, strengthening the impression about concentration of quality services in the provincial capital. It would have been appropriate if the Centre of Academic Leadership was launched in Rawalpindi, which is far behind neighbouring Islamabad as far as quality educational institutions are concerned. As for the bottling plants project, presently the focus is South Punjab where unsafe drinking water has become a major health hazard but the situation in northern and central Punjab is also not satisfactory. Water filtration plants were established in the past but the project could not deliver as per expectations due to lack of maintenance and rehabilitation, which should now be a priority.
