THE nostrum that the government should not be engaged in commercial activities like running PIA, Steel Mills, banks, etc is now generally accepted, even though government pervasiveness in several sectors continues unabated.

It is argued that the government should vacate these areas for the private sector and instead focus its energies and limited financial and human resources on the delivery of neglected social services like education and health. Unfortunately, there isn’t a shred of evidence that it can deliver decent quality social services effectively and cost-efficiently. Take the case of the education sector.

While there is abundant proof of non-existing schools and teachers (‘ghost schools’ and ‘ghost teachers’), teachers playing truant or not recruited on merit, and money for ghost buildings or teachers landing in the pockets of corrupt government personnel, both government and donors continue to pour more resources into this leaking education bucket. They do not address the mega governance issue of teachers’ unions being protected by politicians because of the teachers’ role as polling agents; in fact, teachers blackmail governments trying to proceed against their rampant absenteeism.

It is impossible to dismiss civil servants in Pakistan who do not turn up for duty, let alone those who do turn up but fail to perform the services for which they have been hired. As for their capabilities it is instructive that a test conducted by this writer in 2002 revealed that more than 18pc of teachers were unable to score even 50pc in Grade 3 maths, while a mere 31pc managed to get more than 75pc — despite reliance on textbooks and collaboration with other colleagues in some instances!

Meanwhile, the consumer — households with school-going children — has given up on the public sector and opted for private schools. The private sector has responded to these opportunities and set up schools that cater to these demands — contrary to the popular perception, the private sector services all segments of the population with the vast majority charging less than Rs250 per month.

The private sector has understandably been active where the environment is more lucrative, eg the relatively more affluent Punjab and main cities like Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur, Peshawar and Quetta. As a result, the poorest households in the less developed parts of the country have practically no choice other than the almost non-functional government schools.

That the parents have been voting with their feet, and rejecting the services provided by government, is emphatically reflected in the fact that today compared with 45,000 government schools in Punjab there are more than 60,000 private schools.

But both the government and the donors have ignored this overwhelming proof, claiming that parents are not enrolling their children in government schools because they do not offer adequate facilities of toilets and boundary walls. Hence, their projects have focused on building this infrastructure.

However, additional children have not enrolled in these schools. The inference they have drawn from this experience is that this was owing to lack of classrooms, and lo and behold! These are being constructed but still no more children, while the enrolment in private schools has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Analysing these outcomes they started arguing that what was needed was a) more qualified teachers (although comparable private schools have less academically qualified teachers paid a quarter of the salary of a government school teacher); b) recruitment on contracts (that could be terminated if the teacher was frequently absent or did not perform his/her duties diligently); and c) teachers being tied to a school so as to make them accountable for service delivery.

But to their horror these changes have made little difference to enrolment in government schools. These contract teachers have since been regularised fully imbibing the culture and work ethic of those enjoying ‘permanent status’. Therefore, despite the customer rebuff, which should have been acknowledged as a testimony to the failure of government service delivery, donors and well-intentioned do-gooders continue to press for more dedicated resources. Thus, more money is being poured into a dysfunctional system, which is akin to throwing good money after bad.

The sad reality is that no one wants to hear the clear message being sent out by the consumers; they reject the schooling on offer by the government because of its poor quality. They are not willing to concede that even teachers of government schools where additional infrastructure has been provided, send their children to private schools.

Unless we accept that the objective of providing effective and cost-efficient education cannot be met through the public schooling system we will continue to flounder, wasting scarce resources, chasing a mirage.

In this writer’s view the best way forward for the government is to make sure that children get free schooling using the private sector for service provision, ie financing the provision of schooling, instead of providing the service itself. Study after study has demonstrated conclusively that better quality education is being provided by private schools at a significantly lower cost than what the government spends to educate a child in its own schools.

The Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), where this writer conceived and pioneered this approach, is today educating more than 1.2 million children.

It has shown that better quality education can be provided than that being delivered by government schools by a) providing funding at the rate of Rs400 per child, making the partner school free for enrolled children (half the cost incurred by the government to educate a child in the public schooling system); and b) by making this financial assistance conditional on performance of children in six-monthly tests that it administers in languages, mathematics and sciences.

The PEF experiment conclusively suggests that in future the government should not set up its own schools but fund the private provision of education so that children get free schooling, making the continuing availability of funds to such schools contingent upon decent learning outcomes of the children.

The writer is a former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan.