KARACHI: Provincial Education Minister Nisar Khuhro informed the Sindh Assembly on Tuesday that over 3,725 schools were closed in the province by May 2013 .

He was replying to queries made by legislators during the question hour during the assembly session presided over by Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani.

While over-staffing is generally believed to be rampant in government departments, the largest single reason contributing to schoolclosure was unavailability of teachers, owing to which 1,677 schools were closed, the minister said while answering to a question asked by Pakistan Muslim League-Functional legislator Nusrat Sehar Abbasi. He said 659 schools were closed down as there was no population / no enrolment.

He, however, did not clarify why those schools had been set up if there was no population. He said 1,066 schools were closed as these were non-viable or non-feasible.

Pointing out ill planning or vested interests of the decision makers while setting up schools, the ministercited an example and said that in at least one case, 87 schools had been established in one village while 95 schools had been established in a union council.

He said Tharparkar district topped the list with largest number 641 of the closed schools while some of the other districts that followed were Thatta (433 schools), Umerkot (309), Khairpur (229), Shikarpur (216) and Badin (202).

However, some schools had been re-opened, he added.

He said he had urged the provincial assembly members over a year ago to monitor in their respective areasand inform the department if there were any closed schools in their areas and also join hands with the department to ensure that the schools were reopened, but very few MPAs had provided the information, he added.

The minister did not agree with the MQM legislator Sumeta Syed who said that wrong information had been provided to the assembly as the number of girl students receiving benefits / scholarships from the endowment fund between 2002 and 2012 was highly exaggerated, but after carefully reviewing the numbers provided in thewritten answers distributed in the assembly, he said that might be the numbers were probably not correctly added up, so probably the total was incorrect.

He again did not agree with her that if the education department could not correctly add up a few numbers then what standard of education it would / could be maintaining in the educational institutions under its control. It could be a simple mistake, he said.

In reply to a question by Ms Abbasi regarding a large number of appointments which were made in the education department by previ-ous minister Pir Mazhar-ulHaq, Mr Khuhro said that during the previous government, a large number of appointments of non-teaching staffers and many others, including drawing teachers, physical training teachers, etc., were made without the sanctioned posts.

He said that those who had been appointed against the sanctioned posts were getting their salaries.

But the department did not consider those appointed as legal appointments who were appointed without the sanctioned posts, so t hey were not getting their salaries.