A reporter travels through the rural areas of Pakistan in order to experience and see what the situations actually are. This is what he has to say:
While visiting different parts of the country, particularly, those of the Sindh Province, I have logically concluded that apart from extreme poverty, another significant obstacle to the realization of access to justice in the rural Pakistan is the high level of illiteracy prevalent in the country today. It is most unfortunate that the socio-economic structure of the country has made it impossible for the vast majority of Pakistanis to have access to education, notwithstanding the various development plans and programmes by the successive governments, which emphasized the importance of education but unfortunately not a lot was virtually done on the ground.
This problem has been worsened by the current collapse of public schools, including varsities, which have now made education an exclusive commodity to be purchased and consumed by the bourgeoisie through private institutions.
Yet the inestimable value of education and its capacity to empower the citizenry can hardly be over-emphasized. An educated man will easily adapt to the realities of the situation and have the intellectual capacity to insist on the enforcement of his rights, quite unlike the illiterate. Education thus empowers him/her to maximize the opportunities and resources available in his/her environment.
Since education has the capacity of liberating the individual from ignorance, poverty and diseases, the lack of it has serious mental, political and economic implications, which greatly impede ‘access to justice’ in Pakistan. At a particular level, it breeds poverty, docility, and even forced connivance with agents of oppression and marginalization. The net result is that, today, a large majority of Pakistanis do not have access to social justice and are alienated from the political and economic structures of society. But unfortunately to provide “ access to justice” to the people of this country by promoting literacy, especially, lego-literacy, and alleviating poverty, is not the prime concern of our ruling elite in Pakistan.
While visiting different parts of the country, particularly, those of the Sindh Province, I have logically concluded that apart from extreme poverty, another significant obstacle to the realization of access to justice in the rural Pakistan is the high level of illiteracy prevalent in the country today. It is most unfortunate that the socio-economic structure of the country has made it impossible for the vast majority of Pakistanis to have access to education, notwithstanding the various development plans and programmes by the successive governments, which emphasized the importance of education but unfortunately not a lot was virtually done on the ground.
This problem has been worsened by the current collapse of public schools, including varsities, which have now made education an exclusive commodity to be purchased and consumed by the bourgeoisie through private institutions.
Yet the inestimable value of education and its capacity to empower the citizenry can hardly be over-emphasized. An educated man will easily adapt to the realities of the situation and have the intellectual capacity to insist on the enforcement of his rights, quite unlike the illiterate. Education thus empowers him/her to maximize the opportunities and resources available in his/her environment.
Since education has the capacity of liberating the individual from ignorance, poverty and diseases, the lack of it has serious mental, political and economic implications, which greatly impede ‘access to justice’ in Pakistan. At a particular level, it breeds poverty, docility, and even forced connivance with agents of oppression and marginalization. The net result is that, today, a large majority of Pakistanis do not have access to social justice and are alienated from the political and economic structures of society. But unfortunately to provide “ access to justice” to the people of this country by promoting literacy, especially, lego-literacy, and alleviating poverty, is not the prime concern of our ruling elite in Pakistan.
