By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has launched a scheme to hand out 500,000 Chromebook laptops, each with mobile internet access, to students across Pakistan over the next two years.
Speaking at the launch of the Prime Minister’s Youth Chromebook Scheme in Islamabad on Sunday, Sharif said the devices, fitted with MiFi connectivity, would go to deserving students and high achievers. He said they would be allocated on the basis of “ability and ability alone”. Banners at the venue said the machines to be distributed would be refurbished.
The prime minister said the internet access built into the scheme would extend beyond the students themselves to their families, bringing the number of beneficiaries to an estimated 2.5 million.
“These Chromebooks will help you gain further education, and in the future, these devices will help you secure employment,” he told the gathering.
Sharif pointed to his party’s record on the issue. Previous PML-N governments had distributed 600,000 laptops over a decade, he said, and his administration now aimed to give out 500,000 Chromebooks in two years. He said intelligence and hard work should not be held back by poverty. “These wonderful instruments will be in your hands so that you are not lagging in intelligence and skills,” he said.
He said students of religious seminaries would be eligible, adding that earlier laptop schemes had also reached prominent seminaries.
Sharif began his address by saying it was his duty, and the state’s “collective responsibility”, to give young people modern technology so they could become “the great builders of Pakistan”. “Our boys and girls [..] are the true assets of Pakistan”. He said he hoped the devices would allow students to “attend school remotely [..] and find themselves amongst the most educated people”.
Recalling the recent opening of a Daanish School in Islamabad, he said education “should be the priority of any government”. “For the development of the nation’s children, all the resources should be provided,” he said. “Education is a jewel; regardless of where you are from, it will always make you distinguished in society.”
Sharif thanked the Tokyo Technology Care Foundation (TTCF) for partnering on the scheme. Its chairman, Rashid Minhas, said the memorandum signed with the government was meant to help students become creators in the digital world and to spur a national digital revolution.
The scheme builds on a laptop programme that dates to 2013, when Nawaz Sharif’s incoming government announced a Rs20 billion youth package that included free laptops for high achievers. Sharif revived it after taking office, and he inaugurated the fourth phase of the Prime Minister Youth Laptop Scheme on 30 October last year, with a target of 100,000 laptops for high-achieving students. In August, he said 250,000 high-achieving students would be awarded Chromebook laptops this year.
Chromebooks have become central to the government’s technology policy. In September 2024, Google announced plans to produce 500,000 Chromebooks in Pakistan and presented the first one to Sharif. Last year Pakistan launched its first Google Chromebook assembly line, at the National Radio & Telecommunications Corporation’s facility in Haripur.
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