'Finance ministry does not timely disburse educational budget'

Federal Minister for Education Javed Ashraf Qazi on Wednesday said that Finance Ministry does not timely disburse educational budget and released far less than what was allocated in the budget, last fiscal.
Talking to newsmen after the concluding session of a conference on "Developing and Promoting Entrepreneurship for Poverty Alleviation" here at National Institute of Science and Technology (NISTE), he deplored that education ministry has always to wrangle with Finance Ministry to get the allocated budget for the education.
Giving details about last year, he said that Finance Ministry did not release even half of the allocated budget. It released only 2.3 billion to the Ministry of Education from 5.2 billion budgetary allocations whereas the Ministry had to make a lot of efforts to get released another 1.3 billion, he added.
The government, he said, was asked to provide at least 4 percent of the GDP for education but was only provided 2.7 percent for the current fiscal. With so many constraints, the education ministry, he said, was still striving to bring about improvement in education system to produce a skilled manpower that could steer the country towards development.
Qazi said that the industrialists have been asked to establish technical education centres not only to provide skilled education to their labour but also to the locals. The minister called for injecting more financial resources into the education sector particularly in the technical education.
To a question, he said that the new syllabus would be implemented by next year and was not implemented from the current year because of some mistakes in the syllabus.
Earlier, speaking at the concluding ceremony, Qazi appreciated the efforts of all the organisations including Unesco, HEC, Navtec and MAJU, which sponsored and assisted NISTE in organising the conference on such an important issue. He also thanked the guest speakers from within country and abroad who dilated upon the matter and made the event success.
The minister said that the development of entrepreneurship has close links with poverty alleviation and, at the same time, entrepreneurship development is closely linked with technical and vocational education system, which provides skilled manpower.
He said that the NISTE has been promoting skills and technology and also established a Resource Centre for Developing and Promoting Entrepreneurship for Poverty Alleviation under Unesco funded project.
Resource Centre for Developing and Promoting Entrepreneurship for Poverty Alleviation, organised a two days international conference on "Developing and Promoting Entrepreneurship for Poverty Alleviation" on September 4-5, 2007.
The theme of session-I was Entrepreneurship Development for Poverty Alleviation, during the session-I, eminent scholars from Institute of Skills and Enterprise International Limited (UK), Services for Urban and Rural Entrepreneurship Institute, Lahore, Federal College of Education, H-9 Islamabad, delivered their lectures/papers upon ways and means to alleviate poverty. The opening lecture was on the subject of "Secrets of Wealth Dynamics Through Emotional Intelligence".