A GIRL from rural Balochistan who gets approximately 700 marks in her FSc pre-medical and wants to become a doctor and go back and provide medical services in her underserved region will not get admission in any good public sector medical college as her marks would not be high enough. But the boy from a rich household who went to an excellent high-fee private school in Karachi for his A-Levels will make it — all the boy wants is to complete his medical degree and leave Pakistan to make a life for himself in the US or UK. The notion of ‘merit’ that we work with in Pakistan means that the boy will get admission on merit and the girl will be denied the opportunity.

‘I have just won a gold medal at a track and field event in the Olympics. I have passed all my exams but my grades aren’t as good as they could have been because of the time I had to spend preparing for the Olympics’. A leading private sector university in the country would reject this young person’s application for admission as its notion of merit for admissions is based solely on performance in the Matric/O-Level and Intermediate/A-Level examinations and the undergraduate admission test.

Though public sector institutions have a two per cent quota for persons with disabilities (some 10pc of the population reportedly face challenges), private sector institutions don’t generally have such quotas and only ‘welcome’ a PWD if he/she qualifies on the same parameters as another student. Yet, if you look at the vision statements of any private or public........

© Dawn