The Dr. Mohan Singh Mehta Memorial Trust in association with Shikshantar, Udaipur organized an event at the Vidya Bhawan School Auditorium today, on the ‘Importance of Education’, where the Chief speaker was Dr. Quratulain Bakhtiari.

Dr Bakhtiari, who lives in Karachi, Pakistan, is the Director of Institute for Development Studies and Practices (IDSP). Dr Bakhtiari, whose mother is from Agra was born in Multan and raised in Karachi. She was nominated for the Noble Prize in 2006 and works as a Community Activist and Educationist in Pakistan now.

The evening event started with a brief address by Manish Jain, Founder, Shikshantar. In his address he said, “This is Dr Bakhtiari’s second visit to Udaipur and she has been associated with Shikshantar for a long time”.

Dr. Quratulain Bakhtiari who has been a Community Activist since 1979 said in her address to the audience that she understood the nature of her work and the true culture of Pakistan through her experiences during the IDSP Projects on educating girls. A charming orator, Dr Quratulain expressed her thoughts during the event with various stories and incidents.

She explained how she worked with various Government school schemes in Pakistan earlier and then founded IDSP. IDSP, in the words of Dr. Bakhtiari is a movement that opens Learning Spaces for the young majority population of Pakistan to empower them for generating and regenerating responses to the existing challenges of education, learning, livelihood, peace and pluralism.

Anyone who can read and write in any language can join an IDSP program, said Dr. Quratulain. More than 1100 students have graduated from IDSP programs so far and Dr Quratulain targets to work endlessly for the younger generation.

She spoke on the significance of Ilm (Knowledge). In her stories, she expressed the need for change and the knowledge that can be extracted from education and the learning process.

When asked about the India-Pakistan relationship, she said that the media and politics keep building a wall between the relations of the two countries that are very much alike. Being from the education field, she also cited that both the countries have similar systems and standards of education that have been derived from the British.

The event ended with a Question and Answers session and an interaction session with the Dr Bakhtiari who had also visited Udaipur seven years ago.