Practices and problems of female health/medical technicians in North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan

The Ministry of Health in Pakistan introduced in 1977 mid-level health workers called medical technicians to provide emergency aid and rudimentary services at basic health units and rural health centres. With the policy of placement of doctors in these units in the early eighties, their name was changed to health technicians, whose duties emphasized preventive activities instead of working as doctors’ substitutes. The objectives of this study were to estimate the percentage of graduated female technicians in the service, understand their reasons for not joining or leaving the service, appraise their practices in comparison to the expected performance, identify and report the academic and operational problems and recommend measures to resolve these problems and improve performance

Begum Zari Sarfaraz: Her Role and Contribution in Pakistan Movement

In this brief article, an attempt has been made to revisit the Pakistan Movement in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, former North-West Frontier Province, which acquired a unique character in the sense that here the job of motivating the women was quite difficult because of the strict cultural values and way of life of women folk. Therefore the job of persuading women to participate in the freedom movement seemed difficult. In such circumstances, Begum Zari Sarfaraz rose up from the folk of Women and continued her effort despite discouraging conditions. In this paper, the role and contribution of Begum Zari Sarfaraz, the Khatoon-e-Sarhad, during the Pakistan Movement has been discussed and evaluated. In the line of this argument, the crucial struggle that she led during the final phase of the partition drama will be explored. As far as the literature on Begum Zari Sarfaraz is concerned, very little has been written on her personality as well as on her contribution to the cause of Pakistan.

Pashtun and Punjabi Taliban

This chapter attempts to analyse the dynamics of the Pashtun–Punjabi nexus and the areas of competition and cooperation between Sunni sectarian groups and the Pakistani Taliban. It outlines the links between Sunni sectarian groups and the Afghan Taliban, the impact of the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the implications of the relocation of Punjabi jihadi/sectarian groups in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It also focuses on the consequences of the storming of Islamabad's Lal Masjid in July 2007, and it investigates the re-emergence of sectarian groups in Karachi and in the Punjab and its implications for Pakistan. The Punjab and Karachi have been the primary hubs of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the 1980s, but in the post-9/11 environment the Sunni-Shia conflict has assumed a new dimension.

The Sunni-Shia Conflict in Jhang (Pakistan)

This chapter highlights the violent clashes that mostly happened during Muharram when the Shias perform mourning rituals or azadari in public and take out huge processions. Since the mid-1980s, parties and violent groups, often sponsored by Islamic states, have emerged with a narrow sectarian agenda. The chapter discusses how the level and intensity of violence has tremendously increased in Afganistan and Kashmir due to the availability of weapons and easy access to training facilities. Sunnis and Shias have killed each other in the name of religion in the Punjab, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), in Karachi, and in the Northern Areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. This chapter analyzes the internal and external causes of the emergence of the sectarian conflict in Pakistan at the macro level.

The Establishment of Azad School Utmanzai and Anjuman -i-Islahul Afaghina: A Successful Methodology of Organizational Excellence (1921-1946)

This historical paper explores the role of one of the indigenous educational movement of the British Indian North West Frontier Province, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. The movement 'Anjuman-i-islahul Afaghina' established in 1921 by Abdul Ghaffar Khan also known as Bacha Khan (1890- 1988) and his companions to educate the unprivileged Pakhtuns in the early decades of the 20th century. The Anjuman established 104 Azad schools in the settled as well as tribal territory to educate the nation in formal way, besides education and training was imparted through non formal mode, as well. The strength of the Anjuman was its organizational excellence in the shape of its components like propagation, fund raising, management committees, faculty of intellectuals, co-curricular activities, annual jamborees, conflict resolution committees, literary activities and social reformation. No doubt, the movement contributed to educate the unprivileged Pakhtun nation in ensuring the quantity as well quality of education.

From Panjab to London

In this section Romila Thapar talks about her childhood and family background. Her childhood was spent in various places from the North West Frontier Province of British India to school and college in Pune, before reaching Delhi, from where she went to London. She reflects on the Indian independence movement and the development of her interests in politics. This was almost inevitable among teenagers growing up in the years just before independence and influenced by Indian nationalism. She discusses her reading at that time both of the classics and of popular novels, and describes how she gradually developed an interest in early India. Thapar also shares her experience of the much-discussed Nehruvian ideal of building a new nation and the growth of radical ideas. She describes her years in London, slowly becoming a historian. This brings her to joining Jawaharlal Nehru University and working at the Centre for Historical Studies.

Khowar

Khowar (ISO 639-3: khw) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 200,000–300,000 (Decker 1992: 31–32; Bashir 2003: 843) people in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly North-West Frontier Province). The majority of the speakers are found in Chitral (a district and erstwhile princely state bordering Afghanistan, see Figure 1), where the language is used as a lingua franca, but there are also important pockets of speaker groups in adjacent areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and Swat District as well as a considerable number of recent migrants to larger cities such as Peshawar and Rawalpindi (Decker 1992: 25–26). Its closest linguistic relative is Kalasha, a much smaller language spoken in a few villages in southern Chitral (Morgenstierne 1961: 138; Strand 1973: 302, 2001: 252). While Khowar has preserved a number of features (phonological, morphological as well as lexical) now lost in other Indo-Aryan languages of the surrounding Hindukush-Karakoram mountain region, it has, over time, incorporated a massive amount of lexical material from neighbouring or influential Iranian languages (Morgenstierne 1936) – and with it, new phonological distinctions. Certain features might also be attributable to formerly dominant languages (e.g. Turkic), or to linguistic substrates, either in the form of, or related to, the language isolate Burushaski, or other, now extinct, languages previously spoken in the area (Morgenstierne 1932: 48, 1947: 6; Bashir 2007: 208–214). There is relatively little dialectal variation among the speakers in Chitral itself, probably attributable to the relative recency of the present expansion of the language (Morgenstierne 1932: 50).