ALLOCATIONS made under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) for the current fiscal year are shockingly revealing. While Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boasts at the Oslo Global Summit on Education for Development that promotion of education sector in Pakistan is the priority of his government, the facts belie the claim.

The PSDP has an outlay of Rs700,000 million and the education sector has a meagre share of Rs7,568.124 million or 1.081pc of total proposed development expenditure during 2015-16.

The federal education and special training has an allocation of Rs2,207 million, primarily to finance the ongoing projects, whereas only Rs65 million have been reserved for launching new schemes.

In addition, Rs229 million is allocated under the finance division for capacity building of teachers. The Higher Education Commission budget under the programme is Rs4,577 for new schemes out of a total of Rs20,500 million.

Another allocation of Rs555.12 is earmarked for education in the Islamabad region out of which Rs245 million are for introducing new schemes this year. And nothing more for the education sector out of Rs700 billion since education is a ‘provincial subject’.

Somehow, development for the prime minister remains limited to construction of motorways and highways, as the lion’s share of funds goes to the infrastructure. Another crucially important sector is science and technology, which gets a total allocation of Rs1,060 million only out of which Rs20 million is allocated for new projects —Technology Park in Islamabad, and incentivising of the Small and Medium Enterprises.

The position of allocations for the health sector is not any better either. One wonders how government priorities are set in, and for the benefit of whom?

Hussain Siddiqui

Islamabad

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2015

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