Urdu

Twelve scored readers, four per board, classes 6 to 9 (Sindh's class-9 volume is a combined IX-X book). Every one is Urdu-medium Nastaliq, extracted by tesseract-urd, and this is the lowest-fidelity track in the study. Nothing here is quoted anywhere. What survives degraded script is display type: contents pages, lesson titles, author-biography headers, proper names and Arabic-Indic dates. Everything below is structure and topic, never wording, and several books are not complete inventories at all.

The boards run a shared template at classes 6 to 8 without sharing a single identifiable selection: an opening hamd then a naat, a seerah or Companion lesson, environment and pollution, a Western or Muslim scientist-inventor, sport, agriculture, a lesson on women in the Pakistan Movement, a patriotic nazm and a closing glossary. At class 9 the picture changes completely: Punjab's and KP's class-9 books are effectively the same anthology, eleven of eleven prose lessons matching and the poetry section in the same order (Hali's hamd, Amir Minai's naat, Nazir Akbarabadi, Iqbal, Mir, Aatish, Ghalib, Bahadur Shah Zafar). Both are pre-SNC books built to the 2006 National Curriculum for Urdu Lazmi IX, so the convergence is an artefact of vintage, not of province, and it is reported once under the shared-book rule.

Militarism is where the readers diverge most, and the divergence is vintage-controlled: at the same 2006 generation KP scores 4/4/4 at classes 6 to 8 against Sindh's 2/2/2. KP carries Defence Day and the 1965 air war at class 6, two consecutive martyrdom lessons at class 7 — Ghazi Ilm-ud-Din, the corpus's only non-military religious-honour figure taught as ghazi and shaheed, immediately followed by Colonel Sher Khan of Kargil — and a Kargil narrative at class 8. Punjab's class-6 reader carries an eleven-name Nishan-e-Haider roll (verified by direct image reading of the page rather than by OCR) and an exercise directing pupils to research an army martyr. Sindh's only shaheed is Hakim Muhammad Said, a civilian physician; it is also the only board reaching past 1947 for its exemplars, carrying Edhi and Haji Sir Abdullah Haroon, and the only one that localises literarily, with the Sindhi folk romance Noori Jam Tamachi. KP localises geographically (Swat, a KP province survey) but names no Pashto poet; Punjab does not localise at all.

The cleanest structural finding is gender: no woman is credited as the author of any selection in any of the twelve books, at any level of legibility, while every board simultaneously carries at least one lesson about women's civic or religious contribution. Sindh's class-7 volume, which names five women politicians, is the strongest such treatment. Fuzzy searching also returns zero genuine hits for Manto, Faiz, Bano Qudsia, Qurratulain Hyder, Ashfaq Ahmed and, most surprisingly for a corpus this size, Patras Bukhari.

Class-10 Urdu readers from Punjab, KP and the Federal Board have since been added and scored: all three sit at 3 on religious saturation, and Punjab and KP at 4 on gender, with the Federal reader not carrying a gender score. Punjab's class 10 now runs on a 2026 PECTAA syllabus, a generation beyond the SNC-2022 books its classes 6 to 8 use and two beyond the 2006 anthology it still prints at class 9. Confidence: low throughout, high only for the two class-9 books, which were rebuilt from clean author-biography pages. KP's class-8 reader is more than half unusable and its absence claims carry the least weight anywhere in the study.