Track: Urdu — Comparative Structural Analysis

PCTB (Punjab) · STBB (Sindh) · KPTBB (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Classes 6–9

Status: Structure/theme-grade only. Source is tesseract-urd OCR of Nastaliq print. Nothing in this document is a verbatim quotation. All Urdu strings reproduced below are either (a) lesson/author labels reconstructed from degraded OCR, or (b) short identifying tokens used as evidence of presence. Uncertain readings are marked ?.

READ THE CAVEATS SECTION (§7) BEFORE CITING ANY CLAIM FROM THIS FILE. This is the lowest-fidelity track in the project. Per-claim confidence is stated inline.

1. Corpus and recoverability

Edition note. Punjab 6/7/8 are SNC-era editions (front matter cites “قومی نصاب 2022”, PCTB Lahore) — high confidence. Punjab 9 is an older edition: front matter cites the 2006 National Curriculum, federal approval ref. dated 21-10-2009, printing 2016 (p.2). This edition mismatch is load-bearing for §5. Sindh books cite Bureau of Curriculum Jamshoro approval dated 04-01-2016. KP 8 front matter cites KPTBB/Abbottabad, Directorate of Curriculum. KP 9 states it is written against the “قومی نصاب” (national curriculum) — the pre-SNC one, judging by content.

KP-specific noise: KP files carry perfect24u.com watermark lines and interleaved mirror-ad pages; these were filtered during extraction. KP 6 and KP 8 have the worst raster quality in the corpus — large stretches of those two files OCR to pure noise.

2. Per-book reconstructed lesson lists

Page numbers refer to the ===== PAGE N ===== markers in the OCR files, not printed page numbers.

2.1 PCTB Punjab — Class 6 · confidence: Low–Medium

TOC at p.4 survives only in fragments. Reconstruction below is from the TOC plus lesson-objective (حاصلاتِ تعلم) pages at p.5, 16, 26, 50, 83, 91, 105.

Genre markers detected in-file: نعت ×10, نظم ×4, غزل ×5, مضمون ×14, ڈراما ×8, حمد ×1. The high مضمون count and near-zero افسانہ count indicates an essay-and-poem book with little prose fiction — consistent with SNC class-6 design. (Medium confidence.)

2.2 PCTB Punjab — Class 7 · confidence: Low–Medium

Cover page reproduces an Iqbal quatrain (p.1, the “چراغوں کو مری آہِ سحر دے” supplication) — high confidence, the لفظ علامہ اقبال is legible directly beneath.

2.3 PCTB Punjab — Class 8 · confidence: Medium

TOC at p.4 is the best-surviving PCTB fehrist. Cover credits a حالی-attributed piece (p.1 tag reads “از علامہ محمد اقبال” — partially legible; treat attribution as ?).

Notable: p.84 objectives mention ”…سائنس/بیاض…” and p.78 objectives mention environment — the book carries a science/environment strand. (Medium confidence.)

2.4 PCTB Punjab — Class 9 · confidence: High ⭐

The printed TOC (p.3) is destroyed, but this book is the best-reconstructed in the corpus: every lesson is preceded by a full author-biography page carrying the author’s name and birth–death dates, and these pages OCR’d cleanly. Reconstruction is from those bio pages.

حصۂ نثر (prose section)

حصۂ نظم (poetry section)

Followed by a glossary / فرہنگ section (p.148–152).

2.5 STBB Sindh — Class 6 · confidence: Medium–High

TOC at p.4 survives with ~18 legible entries; cross-checked against lesson pages. Book opens (p.1) with a patriotic quatrain and the tag “پاکستان … پائندہ”.

2.6 STBB Sindh — Class 7 · confidence: Medium–High

TOC at p.3 is largely destroyed but ~4 entries are legible; the book’s lesson-objective boxes (حاصلاتِ تعلم) survive well and carry the lesson topic.

2.7 STBB Sindh — Class 8 · confidence: Medium

Front matter (p.2) states “آٹھویں جماعت کے لیے — نئے نصاب کے مطابق”. TOC pages destroyed; reconstruction from حاصلاتِ تعلم boxes, which survive well in this file.

2.8 STBB Sindh — Class 9–10 (combined) · confidence: Low–Medium

The worst-formatted Sindh file: nearly every page carries a decorative dashed border that OCRs as noise and swamps the title lines. Front matter (p.3) states the book is written per “درسی کتاب برائے جماعت نہم و دہم — نصاب ۲۰…”. Reconstruction is from author date-lines only.

2.9 KPTBB KP — Class 6 · confidence: Low

TOC (p.2) survives as fragments only; three entries partly legible. Reconstruction is from lesson content, not titles. Treat all titles below as descriptions, not printed headings.

2.10 KPTBB KP — Class 7 · confidence: Low

TOC page (p.5) is unreadable. Front matter cites “نصاب 2006” (p.3) — KP 7 is a pre-SNC book.

2.11 KPTBB KP — Class 8 · confidence: Low

The single most degraded file in the corpus. More than half its pages OCR to unusable noise. The TOC (p.3) survives only as a learning-outcomes column, from which two lesson titles leak. Reconstruction is fragmentary and deliberately incomplete — see §7.

2.12 KPTBB KP — Class 9 · confidence: High ⭐

TOC survives at p.4–5 and is explicitly split into حصۂ نثر and حصۂ غزل/نظم. Every lesson is preceded by a clean author-bio page with dates. Second-best-reconstructed book in the corpus.

حصۂ نثر

حصۂ نظم / غزل

3. Cross-board canonical author map

Presence is asserted only where a biography page, TOC entry, or source-credit was legible. ✓ = confirmed; ~ = probable (content match, name mangled); blank = not found. Absence of a ✓ is not proof of absence — see §7.

3.1 Confirmed absences

The following were searched with wide fuzzy patterns across all twelve files and produced zero genuine hits:

4. Women in the corpus

This is a clean, well-evidenced finding and one of the more striking ones.

No woman is credited as an author of any selection in any of the twelve books, at any level of OCR legibility. (Confidence: Medium–High. A female author whose name OCR’d to noise could have been missed, but every author-bio page that IS legible names a man.)

Women appear consistently as subjects of lessons, and this is a strand every board carries:

Reading: the treatment is uniformly commemorative and civic — women as pious exemplars (Khadija, Zainab) or as participants in the national founding — never as literary voices. Sindh 7 is the most substantive of these, naming five individual women politicians. (Confidence: High for the pattern; Medium for any single title.)

5. Similarities and divergences

5.1 ⭐ Punjab 9 and KP 9 are effectively the same book

This is the strongest finding in the track. Confidence: High.

Their reconstructed tables of contents are near-identical in both halves:

• Prose, shared and in near-identical set (11 of 11 KP prose lessons match Punjab 9): Shibli Nomani · Hali · Sir Syed · Muhammad Hussain Azad · Deputy Nazir Ahmed (توبۃ النصوح) · Premchand · Mirza Adeeb · Farhatullah Beg · Imtiaz Ali Taj · Shafiq-ur-Rahman · Colonel Muhammad Khan.
• Poetry, shared and in the same order: Hali (the same hamd — both open “آفاق میں…”) → Amir Minai (naat) → Nazir Akbarabadi (برسات کی بہار, same title) → Iqbal → Mir Taqi Mir → Khwaja Haider Ali Aatish → Ghalib → Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Differences are minor: Punjab 9 orders Imtiaz Ali Taj before Mirza Adeeb (KP reverses them), and Punjab 9 carries one extra unattributed patriotic prose lesson (schools/terrorism, p.100–106) that KP 9 does not.

Interpretation (Medium confidence): both are pre-SNC books built to the same 2006 National Curriculum for Urdu Lazmi IX. Punjab’s front matter dates its approval to 2009; KP 7’s front matter cites نصاب 2006 explicitly. The provincial boards appear to have adopted a common federally-specified selection list at this level and merely re-typeset it. Punjab 6/7/8, by contrast, are SNC-2022 books and diverge sharply from KP 6/7/8 — so the convergence is an artefact of curriculum vintage, not of province.

5.2 Class 6–8: no shared selections, but a shared template

Below class 9 the boards share almost no identifiable individual text. What they share is a topic template, which recurs with striking regularity (Confidence: High for the pattern):

5.3 Where the boards actually diverge

Sindh is the most modern and the most secular-civic. (Confidence: High.) It is the only board carrying 20th–21st-century Pakistani social figures as lesson subjects: Abdul Sattar Edhi (8), Hakim Muhammad Said (8), Haji Sir Abdullah Haroon (7). It is also the only board with an explicit literary-theory lesson (اصنافِ ادب, Sindh 8) teaching the نثر/نظم taxonomy — غزل، قصیدہ، مثنوی، افسانہ، ناول، ڈراما، سفرنامہ، آپ بیتی — as a topic in itself.

KP is the most martial and the most religiously framed. (Confidence: High.) It carries the densest concentration of shahadat/war material: غازیوں اور شہیدوں کا دن (1965 air war, KP 6), Ghazi Ilm-ud-Din (KP 7), Colonel Sher Khan of Kargil (KP 7), an army-valour piece citing Indian press (KP 8). It is also the only board with an ummah-politics lesson — the 1969 Al-Aqsa arson and the 1974 Lahore Islamic Summit (KP 6).

Punjab (SNC editions) is the most pedagogically instrumented and the most content-thin. (Confidence: Medium.) Punjab 6/7/8 devote unusually large page-fractions to حاصلاتِ تعلم outcome boxes, teacher notes, and grammar/rhetoric apparatus (ردیف، قافیہ، تشبیہ، استعارہ، مرکزی خیال). Its literary selections are correspondingly shorter. Punjab 9 — the old-curriculum book — is by far the most literary Punjab volume, which reinforces §5.1.

5.4 Regional and folk literature

(Confidence: Medium–High.)

• Sindh is the only board that localises. Sindh 7 carries the Sindhi folk romance نوری جام تماچی / موریڑو as a lesson, and a biography of the Sindhi leader حاجی سر عبد اللہ ہارون (founder of the newspaper الوحید, 1920). Sindh 7 and 8 also foreground Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Valley civilisation.
• KP localises geographically but not literarily: وادئ سوات (KP 6) and a صوبہ خیبر پختونخوا survey lesson (KP 7). No Pashto poet — Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba — appears anywhere in the KP books. (High confidence on the search; Medium on the conclusion, given KP 8’s degradation.)
• Punjab does not localise at all. No Punjabi-language poet (Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah) appears in any Punjab book. (High confidence.)
• No board carries a translated selection from any Pakistani regional language. The only cross-language traffic is about regions, in Urdu.

5.5 Genre mix

Aggregate genre-marker counts (in-file token frequencies; indicative only — these patterns suffer heavy OCR collision and should not be quoted as statistics):

• Classes 6–8, all boards: dominated by مضمون (essay) and short کہانی; poetry limited to حمد، نعت، and patriotic نظم. Prose fiction is nearly absent; افسانہ barely registers.
• Class 9, Punjab & KP: the mix inverts — a formal حصۂ نثر / حصۂ نظم split, with غزل becoming the single densest marker (PJ9 ×24, KP9 ×13, SD9-10 ×48) and ڈراما and افسانہ appearing as named genres for the first time.
• Religious content is front-loaded everywhere: every one of the twelve books opens with a حمد and (except KP 9, which opens with a seerah prose lesson) places a نعت in the first three selections. (High confidence.)

6. Notable findings

1. The class-9 convergence (§5.1) — Punjab and KP ship what is substantively the same anthology. This is the most citable structural result in the track.
2. Deputy Nazir Ahmed survives OCR only through his novel’s title. His name mangles to مول وی ند براجھ and similar; the identification rests on the legible source-credit (توبةالنصوح) in Punjab 9 and the phrase naming the novel in KP 9 p.40. Anyone grepping for نذیر احمد across this corpus will wrongly conclude he is absent.
3. Patras Bukhari is absent from all twelve books. For a corpus this size, in a tradition where Patras is the default humour selection, this is genuinely surprising and worth verifying against printed copies. The humour slot is instead filled by Farhatullah Beg, Shafiq-ur-Rahman, and Colonel Muhammad Khan — all three, in both class-9 books.
4. Zero women authors, three boards, four grade levels (§4) — while every board simultaneously carries at least one lesson about women’s civic or religious contribution.
5. Sindh 8’s اصنافِ ادب lesson is the only place in the corpus where literary form is taught as explicit content rather than as exercise apparatus.
6. Sindh is the only board reaching past 1947 for its exemplars (Edhi d.2016, Hakim Said d.1998). Punjab’s and KP’s most recent figures are pre-Partition or military.
7. Iqbal is the only author appearing in every board at multiple grade levels. He is also the only poet to get a nazm slot in all three class-9-level books.
8. The KP class-9 TOC explicitly labels its sections حصۂ نثر / حصۂ غزل — a formal editorial choice Punjab 9 makes implicitly (by ordering) and Sindh 9–10 does not make at all.

7. CAVEATS — read before citing

7.1 Source quality

• Every claim in this file derives from tesseract-urd OCR of scanned Nastaliq print. Nastaliq is the worst-case script for open-source OCR: ligatures break, diacritics migrate, and word boundaries are unreliable. Character-level accuracy across this corpus is visibly poor.
• Large display type OCRs best. This is why TOC pages, lesson titles, and author-bio headers are the most recoverable elements, and why this analysis is deliberately pitched at the level of titles, names, and dates rather than content.
• Body text and poetry OCR worst. Poetry lines survive only partially; no verse was reconstructed well enough to attribute on textual grounds alone. All poet attributions rest on the bio page, not the poem.
• Arabic-Indic numerals survive relatively well, which is why author birth/death dates carried most of the identification load in Punjab 9 and KP 9.

7.2 What is NOT established

• This is not a complete lesson inventory for any book except Punjab 9 and KP 9. For the other ten books, an unknown number of lessons were not recovered at all. Counts of lessons per book should not be inferred from the tables above.
• KP 8 is effectively unanalysed. More than half its pages produced no usable text. The eleven rows in §2.11 are what leaked through; the book certainly contains more. Do not treat KP 8’s row in any comparison table as representative.
• KP 6 and KP 7 lesson titles are largely my descriptions of lesson content, not printed headings. They are labelled as such but are easy to mis-cite.
• Sindh 9–10’s ordering is uncertain. Its decorative page borders OCR as dense noise that displaced most title lines; the sequence in §2.8 is inferred from page position and may be wrong.
• Genre-marker counts in §5.5 are contaminated. حالی collides with the common word عالی; آزاد with آزادی; غالب with طالب; ادیب with the common noun for “writer”; منٹو with منٹ (“minute”). The raw frequency matrix was generated and then deliberately not reproduced here because it invites exactly this error. Only the direction of the class-6-8 vs class-9 contrast should be relied on.

7.3 Confidence conventions used

7.4 Negative results

An absence recorded in §3.1 means “no fuzzy-pattern hit across twelve files”, not “confirmed not in the book.” Given §7.2, absences from KP 8, KP 6, KP 7, and Sindh 9–10 carry materially less weight than absences from Punjab 9 or KP 9. The Patras Bukhari and Manto absences are the most robust, because both would normally sit in class-9-level anthologies, and both class-9-level books were reconstructed at High confidence.

7.5 Not verified against ground truth

No claim here has been checked against a printed copy, a publisher’s catalogue, or a curriculum document. Before any of this is published, quoted, or used to make a claim about what Pakistani children read, the class-9 convergence finding (§5.1) and the Patras Bukhari absence (§6.3) in particular should be confirmed against physical or born-digital editions.

Generated from OCR text only. Page references use the ===== PAGE N ===== markers inserted during extraction and do not correspond to printed page numbers.

Balochistan (BTBB) — three readers, all theme-grade

Added 23 Aug 2026. Urdu 6, 7 and 9 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions. Urdu 8 and Urdu 10 could not be found. All three held volumes are Urdu-medium, so everything below is structural: no wording from these books is quoted anywhere on this site.

A1 = 3 at all three classes: recurrent religious reference with at least one dedicated devotional selection, legible from chapter structure rather than from wording. That is the same band this track assigns to Punjab’s and KP’s Urdu readers, and it reflects what the national-language reader is in every province — a vehicle for canon, and the canon is substantially devotional.

What cannot be said about these books, and why it matters here more than elsewhere. This track’s most valuable findings on other boards come from reading selections: which authors are chosen, whether any woman is credited as author, whether a patriotic or martial lesson sits in the reader. For Balochistan none of that is recoverable at a standard this project will publish. The correct description of its Urdu readers is not established, not mild — and the two are easy to confuse when a table shows the same number.

The missing classes are the ones that matter. Class 8 and class 10 are where the other boards’ Urdu readers carry their heaviest patriotic and martial content — Punjab’s class-10 reader is the largest Urdu volume in the corpus at 390,000 extracted characters. Balochistan’s equivalents are absent from the record entirely.

The honest summary is short. Balochistan publishes an Urdu reader at classes 6, 7 and 9 that is structurally comparable to the other boards’; this project cannot read it; and the two volumes most likely to differ are the two it does not hold. Any cross-board claim about Urdu-medium literary selection in Balochistan should be treated as unmade rather than as negative — and the standing recommendation applies with particular force here: a Nastaliq-tuned OCR pass over these three books would change more of this track than any further acquisition.