The United States intends to allocate the largest chunk of 282 million dollars of the 1.5 billion dollars annual Kerry Lugar assistance for education, according to the US Embassy in an exclusive exchange of e-mails.
This allocation is in line with the eighteenth amendment approved by the National Assembly on April 8, 2010 which inserted a new article 25-A in the Constitution that reads "Right to education: the state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such a manner as may be determined by law." However, the same was ignored in the federal budget for fiscal year 2010-11 with Rs 20.57 billion allocation for education, which is around Rs 10 billion less than allocation in 2009-10.
The federal government however maintains that education is no longer a federal subject subsequent to the eighteenth amendment and the responsibility for enhancing education expenditure now resides with the provinces. Punjab allocated Rs 29 billion for education and Sindh Rs 7.9 billion appallingly low to enable the provinces meet the eighteenth amendment targets.
The second major allocation as envisaged by the US government is earmarked for economic growth, which is $226 million followed by health/water $221 million, agriculture $146 million, energy $109 million, democracy/governance $113 million, humanitarian/social assistance $160 million, $170 million for law enforcement/border, security/counter, narcotics, $22 million for counterterrorism and $50 million for media. It is unclear how much, if any, of this support has been released to-date.
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