Biology

Three scored books, one per board, class 9, all English-medium. Sindh's and KP's are the same nine-chapter book in the same order — introduction, solving a biological problem, biodiversity, cells and tissues, cell cycle, enzymes, bioenergetics, nutrition, transport — and both prefaces give the same origin story, a reduction from an earlier nineteen chapters to fit the working hours. Punjab, rewritten to the revised National Curriculum 2023, has eleven: it adds Biomolecules, Reproduction in Plants and a full Biostatistics chapter, drops Nutrition as a standalone, folds transport into a broader Plant Physiology chapter and reorders biodiversity to second. Biostatistics is a genuinely new strand — the word occurs 28 times in Punjab against two in KP and one in Sindh, and "median" 25 times against zero in both.

What survived Punjab's complete rewrite is the more interesting fact. All three books open with an Introduction chapter containing the same four elements: branches of biology, careers in biology, a dedicated Quranic section, and the biological method illustrated by malaria. All three score A1 3 on that scriptural section and all three examine pupils on it. Punjab's is section 1.4, "Quranic Instructions to Reveal the Study of Life", with an assessed learning outcome; Sindh's is section 1.1.3, "Quran and Biology"; KP's is section 1.6, "Holy Quran and Biological Science", carrying six verses and the longest scriptural treatment of the three. This is the most aligned feature in the entire corpus and it is not a board difference.

The divergence sits at the edges, and it is subtle. Punjab introduces Al-Nur 45 with the gloss that the Quran "describes the common origin and modification of animals" and reads Al-Anbiya 30 as hinting at common origin — the only place in the corpus where a board uses scripture to support an evolutionary framing. Sindh reads the same verse materially, symbolising water with protoplasm. And Punjab kept the scripture while dropping the Muslim-scientist history-of-science section that both Sindh (section 1.1.4, examined by the exercise "Describe the role of Muslim scientists in the field of biology") and KP (section 1.7) retain — the two strands moved independently.

Currency splits the same way as the rest of the sciences. Punjab defines COVID-19 substantively and returns to it as the worked public-health example in its Biostatistics chapter; Sindh and KP have zero COVID content anywhere, dating their material to before 2020 whatever the print year says. Careers content is strongest in KP. Sindh localises genuinely, using a bar chart of malaria cases reported in Sindh; KP's one substantive localisation in science is the hunting of migratory birds passing through Chitral.

Only two axes were assigned. A7 is 5 for Punjab (one female-marked token in 39,776 words) and KP (three in 51,382). Sindh scores 4 despite a low ratio, because it is the one science book in the corpus that discusses gender as a subject at all, on cultural preference for men and girls' malnutrition — "boys often get more food than girls do". Against that, Watson and Crick are credited with the DNA double helix in three books in this corpus and Rosalind Franklin appears zero times anywhere in it.

Be honest about the coverage: beyond A1 and A7, the six social lenses barely touched these volumes, and nothing about civics, othering, militarism or national narrative is established for any of them. The scored set is class 9 only; class-10 Biology from Punjab and KP has since been added to the corpus and is unscored, and Punjab's class 10 now runs on a 2026 PECTAA syllabus — a third curriculum generation for one board inside one subject sequence, and a reminder that the Punjab-versus-anyone comparison in science grows more confounded, not less. Confidence is otherwise high; Sindh's file is native digital text with no page markers and must be cited by section.