HERE are finally signs that the state may be adopting a sensible approach to protecting educational institutes in the country. Indeed, there has been little let-up in the fear generated by the grotesque attacks on the Army Public School in Peshawar in 2014 and the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda earlier this year. But on Saturday, the Sindh Rangers launched a software application for the safety of schools and colleges in Karachi, selecting 15 places, in the initial stage, for the operation and testing of the immediate response system. Under this project, registered institutions will be provided a code enabling them to send a text message to the security system and the mobile phones of Rangers officials up to the rank of commanders. The intention is to link up the system with the police station and Rangers checkpoints in the area concerned, with the city being divided into 60 sections with a Rangers company being made responsible for security. The scale of the task is not small: there are some 15,000 educational institutions in Karachi.

Even though the military is winding down operations in the tribal areas and the fight against terrorism is being taken to other parts of the country, the fact is that the threat of militancy is far from over. And educational institutes, as the militants have reminded us, remain targets because they are perceived as promoting the state`s ideology. This point was brought home even before the APS attack when militants would blow up girls` schools in the north of the country. Even after the Peshawar massacre and the consensus on the National Action Plan, the state blundered in crafting its response.

Educational institutions were told to beef up their security and add to their defence detail armed guards, raised boundary walls installed with razor-wire, and so on. The question of where the resources would come from was not deliberated over. Moreover, some rather odd ideas were mooted, even temporarily implemented in some places with disastrous results, such as allowing staff and students to bear arms. Or students were subjected to poorly planned re-enactments of militants` attacks.

In this context, the experiment in Karachi is worth conducting.

The hope is that emergency response times can be improved and coordination between law enforcers and educational institutions indeed among the various branches of the law-enforcement authorities themselves tightened. There will no doubt be some hiccups initially, but these can be reviewed to close the loopholes. A system such as this, if in effective working order, could be replicated by law-enforcement authorities across the country. The geotagging of police vehicles with a central coordinating command centre, for example, would improve response efficiency. In the next few weeks, institutions across the country will begin their long summer break.

That provides the time and the impetus to fine-tune and perfect such protective systems.