{"book":"adl0957","page":215,"text":"168\n\nOfficers' Military Course, where he gave sufficient proof of his great mental powers. He was asked to work in different departments of public affairs, where he soon won the esteem and affection of those who came in contact with him. During the absence of Sardar Shah Mahmoud Khan, he officiated as the Minister of Defence, and then was asked to head the Ministry of Education, which post he successfully held until the tragic death of his father.\n\nOn the very day of his accession, the King declared that he would scrupulously follow in the footsteps of his father and fulfil his programme. He takes a keen interest in every public affair and has never relinquished his efforts to improve the condition of his subjects, to diffuse knowledge, to promote agriculture and develop the natural resources of the country.\n\nThanks to the ability and high principles, and the administrative experience of his uncles and cousins, a slow but steady progress is being made in every direction. The present government, under the direction of Sardar Mohammad Daoud, the Prime Minister*, is working on vast plans for the educational, industrial and agricultural development of the country, and public welfare generally. A Five Year Plan envisages the construction of better roads, better means of transportation and communication and the development of mines, industry, education and agriculture. To implement these extensive projects, the Government has availed itself of the technical and financial assistance of foreign organizations and institutions as well.\n\n*Since 1929, Afghanistan has had three Prime Ministers:—\n(1) H.R.H. Sardar Mohammad Hashim Khan, 1929 to 1946\n(2) H.R.H. Sardar Shah Mahmoud Khan, 1946 to 1953\n(3) H.R.H. Sardar Mohammad Daoud, from 1953","chars":1756,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00215.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/215","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/215","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}