16 May 2004	Sunday	25 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

PESHAWAR: Aurangzeb owns a shop in a crowded market in Peshawar where he sells garlands made out of flowers and currency notes. He is 35 years old and his major worry is to provide his two sons good education. To that end, he keeps shifting them from school to school.

He is not satisfied with the quality of education his sons are getting in a public sector school in which they have recently been admitted to - their fourth school in three years.

With a monthly income between Rs6,000 and Rs7,000 and a family of eight including three daughters and two sons, he is one of the numerous city residents who have limited choice when it comes to providing their children quality education.

The failure of public sector institutions to ensure decent education poses a big question mark for people of the province which has seen huge investment in the education sector during the last few years.

The NWFP government spent Rs1.4 billion on education under its Annual Development Programme for the 2002-03 financial year, Rs2.6 billion is being spent under the current financial year's ADP - the highest allocation ever.

In previous years, too, the education sector received major funding out of the ADP but without yielding any significant results as the province is still at the bottom of the literacy chart when compared with other provinces.

With considerable funding arranged from internal and external resources, the province managed to establish 22,600 primary schools, over 2,000 middle schools, 1,340 high schools and 200 higher secondary schools to achieve the national goal of education for all by 2015.

Officials say that the province has received major investments during the last few years. The funds will be used to improve the social services delivery system at the grassroots level by strengthening the social sector with emphasis on the sub-sectors of education, health, roads and water supplies.

The World Bank's structural adjustment credit - involving three annual instalments of $90 million each - makes development of the social sector binding on the provincial government.

After education, the health sector received substantial funds from last year's and this year's ADP.

However, according to official sources, utilization of funds in the education and health sectors during the last two years with a total investment of over Rs5 billion did not make much of a difference because of a variety of reasons.

Ill-planning on the part of the development planners and a lack of capacity at the end of the project executing agencies prevented the government from utilizing the loan properly.

Though the World Bank loan helped the government in constructing boundary walls and latrines in thousands of schools - particularly those for girls - in an attempt to improve infrastructure facility, much still needs to be done to improve education standards in public sector schools. Factors causing standards to fall include absenteeism among teachers and a high dropout rate after the primary level.

Similarly, there are growing indications that the provincial government may withdraw the autonomous status granted to four public sector hospitals of the provincial capital because of their decline in standards.

"Ever since the four hospitals were made autonomous the quality of services has sharply declined. They have found it difficult to cope with the financial constraints brought by the autonomy, which meant that the government would no longer subsidize them," said sources.

The sources said that development initiatives being carried out at different levels and tiers of the government not only caused wastage of public funds, they did not allow the social sectors to record the improvement they should have experienced by virtue of the heavy investment made in the education and health sectors during the last couple of years.

Apart from the federal government and provincial government, development works are being designed and executed under the supervision of the district governments, town/tehsil municipal administrations, union councils, members of the provincial assembly, senators and members of the National Assembly (who have been allocated considerable funds to carry out schemes in their respective constituencies).

Such a situation has not only been characterized by ill- planning, it has also caused duplication of resources and a wastage of funds because of overlapping development works. Further, it has ruined the working relationship between different tiers of government, over-burdened agencies executing the projects and the departments of the provincial government.

Similarly, the provincial government's policy of making the district governments spend 70 per cent of the total funds provided to them for development purposes on the social sector has resulted in problems.

"No matter whether a district needs more investment in education or not, local governments are bound to invest specific amount of funds in the said sector because of the provincial government's guidelines," says a development planner of the province.

In one such incident, according to sources, the provincial government designed a scheme to upgrade a middle school, in one of the southern districts of the province, to the level of high school despite the fact that it had only seven students.

Similarly, the Bannu district government has been constrained to establish more schools despite the fact that there are hundreds of schools which were not functional, maintained the Nazim of Bannu district.