Editorial
It was on 20 September 2025 when at least six children were buried alive and three others were injured after the roof of an academy came crashing down in Pindi Bhattian, Sheikhupra district Lahore division, Punjab province of Pakistan. The immediate reason for the collapse was considered to be that the academy building had been weakened by the torrential rains. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz expressed a deep sense of grief and ordered an inquiry.
On 30 June 2026, 14 children were killed and nine others, including a teacher, were injured after the roof of a private tuition centre collapsed in Lahore’s Kahna area, triggering a massive rescue operation as authorities launched an investigation into the tragedy. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz again expressed a deep sense of grief and ordered an inquiry, while the inquiry report into the September 2025 incident is still not available in media reports.
The recent incident took place in Basti Eid Gah near Qurban School on Ferozepur Road, where dozens of children were attending classes when the roof of a room inside a residential building caved in.
Any detailed research can find many such incidents in Pakistan where the provincial as well as the federal governments are responsible for enforcing educational institutions’ rules and regulations. There are several wings within the provincial education departments that are supposed to monitor the conditions under which private as well as public schools are operating. After such incidents, grief is always expressed and inquiries are held by the administration. The safety of children travelling to and from educational institutions is the responsibility of both families and the government.
In Punjab, roughly 1.5 million unregistered (because no data is available due to no registration of these vehicles) three-wheelers are plying on road without number plates/ registration numbers, or any official legal identity, and a majority of these vehicles are used for transporting children to and from schools. Many of them are driven by underage drivers who have no identification record with the vehicle registration department or the police. In road accidents, particularly hit-and-run cases, the police are often unable to trace these vehicles because they do not have number plates. Several such incidents have taken place in Punjab during the last 10 years, with no clue about either the vehicle or the driver responsible.
The same is true of tuition centres, as the Punjab Education Department hardly has any proper documentation of such institutions. Whenever an unfortunate incident takes place, the education department first checks whether the educational institution was officially registered or not. This is what has been going on all over Pakistan. Government departments receive full salaries, perks, and privileges, but they always pass the buck whenever something goes wrong. Since the bureaucracy in Pakistan, particularly under the rule of the PML-N, appears to operate with little accountability, everything continues as “business as usual.” The provincial as well as the federal governments are reluctant to undertake structural reforms that would make government departments accountable, yet they repeatedly claim that reforms are needed.
According to the Annual School Census 2023–2024, the School Education Department in Punjab operates the largest network of public schools in Pakistan, with a total of 48,473 operational schools. Of these, 22,935 are boys’ schools and 25,538 are girls’ schools, while 11,897 schools are run through public-private partnerships under the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) and the Punjab Education Initiatives Management Authority (PEIMA). There is no publicly available report indicating how many of these schools have basic facilities such as proper buildings, sanitation, clean drinking water, and electricity. Raising questions about educational facilities in Pakistan is becoming taboo for investigative journalism, and officials usually refuse to provide journalists with the data and facts they request.
