Population rise cripples public education in Pak
At the Tanjai Cheena school in northwest Pakistan students squeeze into makeshift classrooms where plastic tarps serve as walls and electricity is sparse, as a surging population overstretches the country's fragile education system.
Sandwiched behind desks like sardines, students repeat words learned in Pashto and English during an anatomy lesson: "Guta is finger, laas is hand".
Two teachers rotate between four classrooms at the school, which lacks even the most basic amenities including toilets.
"The girls usually go to my house and the boys to the bushes," says principal Mohammad Bashir Khan, who has worked at the school in the picturesque Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province for 19 years.
With birth control and family planning virtually unheard of in this ultraconservative region, the ill- equipped public school system has not kept up with population growth.
"In 1984, when my father started the school, there were 20 to 25 kids. Now they are more than 140," Khan says.
Pakistan sits on a demographic time bomb after years of exponential growth and high fertility rates resulted in a population of 207 million — twothirds of whom are under the age of 30.
And each year the country gains three to four million more people, overburdening public services from schools to hospitals.
At the Malok Abad primary school in the town of Mingora, 700 boys share six classrooms, many of which remain damaged from a 2005 earthquake with clumps of plaster still falling from their ceilings. The youngest students study in the courtyard sitting on the ground, while others are forced to gather on the roof under the baking sun. "We are doing our best. But those kids are neglected by the system," says teacher Inamullah Munir.