As many as 17,000 students of the government schools and colleges currently occupied by flood displaced people are likely to miss out on their academic year if IDPs are not immediately relocated to alternate shelters.

Furthermore, a majority of private schools had also turned down the district education department’s request for making available their buildings for running classes for the affected government students in second shifts, Executive District Officer (EDO), Hyderabad, Education Niaz Ahmed Laghari said Thursday.

“Keeping in view the break of summer vacations, educational institutions were converted to relief camps for urgent but ephemeral accommodation of the IDPs,” the EDO maintained, adding that the occupation had prolonged to an unbearable extent.

He cautioned that if the government did not take any prompt action for early resumption of the stalled learning process than an entire academic year of the affected students would go waste.

Laghari informed that the education infrastructure had suffered a loss of at least Rs 75 million in the district and once the IDPs had withdrawn from there, cleaning and repair work would have to precede the restart of academic activities as soon as possible. READ MORE »