Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has allocated Rs700 billion to federal PSDP in FY16, a stark increment over the prior year’s Rs542 billion. A lot of highways and railways and power projects were mentioned. But what is education’s cut?
Dar has reiterated the PML-N’s manifesto to bring Pakistan’s education expenditure to 4 percent of GDP, saying “we remain committed to this goal.” But is it really possible? The total spending on education is just 1.67 percent of GDP right now, of which federal spending is 0.34 percent of GDP. To achieve this ambitious target, federal spending would have to be 0.8 percent, and provincial spending would have to be 3.2 percent of GDP. The PML-N has only three years to do this.
Since the provinces’ budgets haven’t been announced yet, for now we’ll just have a look at the federal budget. The graph illustrates how total federal spending on education increases with total expenditure. This might look fine at first, but then we see the problem; education’s share in the federal budget has been static near the 2 percent mark for the past six years. And for the coming year, it has actually gone down by 4 basis points.
If we look at education as a percentage of GDP, the situation is the same; federal spending on education has been dormant at 0.3 percent of GDP - and FY16 seems no different. In any case, it’s not the spending alone that matter; education results are equally important. And the results reflected in education statistics, net primary enrolment ratio (5-9 years) and literacy rate, have showed no significant change. It’s time to reassess priorities and give education a larger share.
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